Film | Local director’s short earns two more int’l awards

Cheong Kin Man (left)

Local translator, interpreter and filmmaker Cheong Kin Man’s award-winning film, “A Useless Fiction”, was this month bestowed with two further awards at two Indian film festivals.

The 32-minute film secured the awards for Best Editing at the Indian World Film Festival in Hyderabad and Best Documentary Film Award at Atharva Short and Documentary Film Festival in Bombay on March 19 and 10 respectively.

The awards join others bestowed on the film from festivals in Canada, Spain, the U.S., Taiwan, China and India. It was also selected at the Bogotá Film Festival (Colombia), Duisburger Filmwoche (Germany), Singapore International Film Festival, Kumu Art Film Festival (Estonia), and DocFest (Vietnam).

Cheong’s film also received praise from notable filmmakers and film critics. Among these is the former artistic director of the International Film Festival and Awards – Macau, Marco Müller, who included Cheong’s works in his description of local filmmaking movements. Müller said that he regards works such as these as an example of “the strength of new Macau cinema.”

Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel described the piece as a “great success”, while Macau newspapers generally praised “A Useless Fiction”.

As for the year of 2017, the film is set to be screened at a number of festivals in countries such as France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Macedonia and the U.S.

The Macau filmmaker is a PhD student of Visual Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin. He describes the winning piece as an “experimental ethnographic short film.”