Two Australian films –Adam Elliot’s Memoir of Snail and Robert Connolly’s Magic Beach – are nominated for this year’s Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA).
A total of 31 films from 23 Asia Pacific countries will contest the awards, to be held next month on the Gold Coast.
Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light and Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April lead the field with nominations across five categories, including Best Film and Best Director.
A record number of nominees will receive Australian theatrical releases across the peak summer box-office period, with All We Imagine as Light, Magic Beach, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, No Other Land, Ghost Cat Anzu, The Colours Within, The Mountain, and Memoir of a Snail all set to hit Aussie screens.
Memoir of a Snail is up for Best Animated film, going against Hur Bum-Wook’s Pig That Survived Foot-and-Mouth Disease, Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Ghost Cat Anzu, Naoko Yamada’s The Colours Within (Kim No Iro), and Carl Joseph Papa’s The Missing (Iti Mapukpukaw).
The stop-motion film, which features the voices of Sarah Snook, Jacki Weaver, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Magda Szubanski, and Eric Bana, follows a lonely misfit snail collector as she retells her life story to a garden snail, detailing her hardships, hopes, and friendship with an eccentric elderly woman.
Elliot previously took home the APSA for Best Animated Film in 2008 for his feature Max and Mary.
Connolly’s Magic Beach, directed in collaboration with a team of animators, is up for Best Youth Film. The film received early script development funding from the MPA APSA Academy Film Fund and is one of three nominated films this year that benefited from it.
Other nominees in the category include Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong, Antoinette Jadaone’s Sunshine, Rachel House’s The Mountain, and Qu Youjia’s She Sat There Like All Ordinary Ones (Kai Shi De Qiang).
Four new fund recipients are set to be announced during this year’s ceremony, each receiving grants of US$25,000.
In congratulating the nominees APSA chair Tracey Vieira noted two thirds of the nominated titles were debut or sophomore films, representing the “cinematic excellence of the next generation of Asia Pacific voices”.
The 17th Asia Pacific Screen Awards will be preceded by the 6th Asia Pacific Screen Forum. Held over four days, the event comprises a series of networking events, roundtable discussions, workshops, panels, and screenings.
The program commences with Connect: Navigating the Human Side of Co-Productions, an immersive day of workshops focusing on emphasising the human element of co-productions.
The 17th Asia Pacific Screen Awards will take place on November 30 at The Langham, Gold Coast
See here for the full list of nominees.