Eight young directors from Japan, Thailand and China became the first winners of the new Asian New Talent Awards set up for the 7th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF), which closed on Sunday.

Chinese director Zhu Wen and a team of six directors from Thailand won the two 75,000-yuan (US$9,000) Asian New Talent Awards for Best Director, for their films South of the Clouds (Yun de Nanfang) and My Girl, respectively.

The 150,000 yuan (US$18,000) Asian New Talent Award for Best Film went to Walking with the Dog by Japanese director Makoto Shinozaki.

Ten films from six Asian countries China, Singapore, Japan, Thailand, India and South Korea were finalists in the competition for the Asian New Talent Awards.

A three-member jury, including David Bordwell, a film critic from the United States, said that South of the Clouds by Zhu Wen, a member of China's sixth generation directors, vividly depicts colorful Yunnan Province in Southwest China from an original perspective, while the six young Thai directors' My Girl gives a beautiful presentation of the purity of young men and women's first love.

Makoto Shinozaki's Walking with the Dog is regarded as a work full of humor and drama in its portrayal of the relationship between an innocent boy and a dog.

"These movies are not only faithful to the local societies they portray, but also use diverse cinematic languages. The leading characters of these movies are not supermen or dandies but everyday heroes whom we meet every day and who struggle with common problems," said Bordwell, adding that all the submitted films were of high professional quality.

He says he believes that the Asian New Talent Award is "very significant and a major contribution to world culture. It takes the rising status of Asian films into the global context and will definitely encourage more and more talented film makers from different continents to work together.

"The extraordinary energy and creativity of these new directors gives reason to believe that the future of Asian films is bright and that the new century will see the fruition of global cinema," he said.

Ren Zhonglu, vice-executive president of the festival's organizing committee, says the new award was set up "to encourage the rise of Asia's new generation of film directors so as to attract more Asian talent to contribute to the prosperity of the Asian film industry."

Zhu Wen became one of the first sixth generation directors to win a major award at home. Obviously pleased, he says the award is a huge push for him, since he works under great disadvantages.

"New movie makers work with low budgets, have hardly any access to high technology and often face marketing and distribution problems," he said.

"Then you are caught in the conflict between so-called artistic films and commercial films, for if your first movie is a commercial failure, no matter how much artistic value they might have, no one will dare to invest in your later films."

He regards the new award as a kind of recognition of all the new film makers in Asia, who are striving so hard to attract funding and trust so that their movies may reach the ordinary viewing public.

Bordwell spoke particularly highly of the films from South Korea, saying that they are representative of Asian films.

"They are genre-based like the Hollywood productions. They have romantic comedies, gangster and police films and horror films. Their directors know what audiences want and have effective advertising techniques," he says.

(China Daily June 15, 2004)