(china org) The 24th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) organizers announced jury panel for its Golden Goblet Award on Tuesday.Veteran filmmaker Huang Jianxin, responsible for many mainstream blockbusters such as "Beginning of the Great Revival", will be the president of the international jury for the main competition of feature films. Other jurors include Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen, Chinese actor and director Deng Chao, Italian film critic and historian Marco Müller, French producer Natacha Devillers and Chinese actress Song Jia.
The international jury in the animation category consists of director Chang Guangxi, as president, and Chinese animation director Wang Yunfei and German producer Jan Heinze, while the jury in documentary category are Chinese director Zhang Yang, British director Arthur Jones and Chinese director Yang Lina.
In addition, the jurors for the short film category are Anthony Chen (as president) and Wang Yunfei, as well as cinematographer Kees Van Oostrum from the Netherlands.
The Golden Goblet Award winners will be announced at a ceremony on the evening of June 19. The competition films include Iwona Siekierzynska's "Amateurs" (Poland), Chui Mui Tan's "Barbarian Invasion" (China's Hong Kong/Malaysia), Dai Wei's "The Chanting Willows" (China), Alexey Viktorovich Kozlov's "The Conscience" (Russia), Abolfazl Jalili's "The Contrary Route" (Iran) and Necip Caghan Ozdemir's "Pure White" and Diana Zuros' "Since August" (USA/Georgia), according to the first part of the list released by the organizers.
The animated films competing for awards include Lin Yongchang's "Realm of Terracotta" (China), Denisa Grimmova and Jan Bubenicek's "Even Mice Belong in Heaven" (Czech Republic/France/Poland) and Ilya Maksimov's "Gulliver Returns" (Ukraine).
The festival will exhibit films from various countries. Ticket sales will start on 8:00 a.m. on June 5. A total of 4,443 films from 113 countries and regions have applied for the festival, a record high. More than 400 films were selected to be screened at the festival, among which, 73 will hold world premieres, 42 will hold international premieres, 89 will hold Asian premieres, 99 will hold China premieres.
The year's Belt and Road Film Week will showcase 20 films recommended by the Belt and Road Film Festival Alliance not only in Shanghai, but also in another five cities - Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo, and Hefei.
This is the first time the Shanghai film festival will be holding film exhibition events outside the main host city; allowing fans in the Yangtze River Delta region to share the latest fruits of filmmakers from countries along the Belt and Road and allow the Yangtze River Delta to work towards coordinated cultural development. A total of 1,136 films from countries along the Belt and Road applied for the festival.
This year's festival will continue to implement strict COVID-19 pandemic prevention and control, with no more than 75% of tickets for each screening being sold.
The SIFF Market and the TV Market will adopt the OMO mode - a virtual market that expands the space for display, negotiation, and transaction beyond the physical market and realizes the "dual mechanism of a virtual and physical platform" by providing virtual value-added services, according to the organizers. This year, a total of 750 exhibitors will participate in the markets, more than the figure in 2019.
Source: china.org by Zhang Rui