Osian's Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema
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Osian's-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema is a special interest film festival held annually in July in New Delhi. Established in 1999, the festival is devoted to films from Asia and the Arab world.
[edit] History
Cinefan began in 1999 as an outgrowth of Cinemaya, a quarterly Asian cinema magazine published in New Delhi since 1988. The festival was launched with 27 films presented by the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) and supported by the Government of Delhi. The focus that first year was on cinema of Japan as well as the 30th anniversary of the Indian New Wave with a selection of films by New Wave directors.
The festival found further backing in 2004 from Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art and it became Osian’s-Cinefan.
[edit] Festival sections and competition
The film festival's sections include:
- Cross-Cultural Encounters – Films dealing with collisions and collusions of cultures.
- In-Tolerance – Films that portray the intolerance of our times.
- Arabesque – Films from the Arab world.
- Frescoes – Recent films from Asian and Arab countries.
- Indian Mosaic – The best of the previous year’s productions in India (non-competition).
There are also tributes to directors and actors and competitions for Asian and Indian films. The awards are conferred by international juries while independent juries give away the NETPAC and FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) awards.
A Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Cinema has been established, with Indian scholar and writer Chidananda Dasgupta as the first recipient. Other recipients include Donald Richie and Peggy Chiao Hsiung-Ping.
