Mulan International Film Festival (MulanIFF) announces The Trapped Pig by LIN Binghan and The Day Is Over by QI Rui, as the winners of the first-ever Audience Award for Short Film and Audience Award for Feature Film in the Fountainhead Programme. Cash prizes of $250 and $1000 Canadian dollars are awarded directly to the directors, respectively.
Director LIN Binghan has directed several award-winning genre films, arthouse films and documentaries that focus on social issues in China. The Trapped Pig, tells a haunting, almost surreal story of a Wuhan truck driver, who is travelling home for the Chinese New Year with a precious boar, being trapped in one-person quarantine zone at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Director QI Rui has been engaging in documentary filmmaking since 2001. He was selected to the Asian Film Academy (AFA) Training Program of the 2006 Busan International Film Festival. The Day Is Over, his debut fiction feature, won the Work-in-Progress Jury Award at the 3rd Pingyao International Film Festival and the Firebird Award at the 45th Hong Kong International Film Festival. The Day Is Over tells an intimate, quiet yet powerfully emotional story of four left-behind girls in a remote village trying to find a way to the big city, to join their parents or find a job.
The Fountainhead Programme, created in 2019, celebrates and promotes emerging talents and their works with creative originality. Entries were collected via an open call for submission. They were then reviewed and selected first by the Curatorial Team of MulanIFF, then by the Final Selection Committee. NAI An (long-time producing partner of the acclaimed director LOU Ye), YANG Lina (leading independent filmmaker in China) and Elizabeth Wijaya (Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies and Cinema Studies Institute of the University of Toronto) are on the 2022 Final Selection Committee.
Audience members of the screenings of The Fountainhead Program casted their votes and decided the winners of the Audience Awards.
The Mulan International Film Festival is Canada's largest film festival that celebrates Chinese-language films and Chinese filmmakers all around the world. The third edition of the festival is held from August 12 to August 20, 2022, at the University of Toronto, St. George Campus. The festival opens with Keep Rolling by MAN Lim Chung, a documentary on one of the most important Chinese directors, Ann HUI, and closes with the Canadian Premiere of QIU Jiongjiong's latest film, A New Old Play.
For more information, please visit mulanfestival.com.
