‘Yesterday Once More’ nabs Jury’s Award at Macao Indies 2015

Director Emily Chan receives the Jury’s Award

The long feature “Yesterday Once More” has beaten 24 other homemade productions in the ninth edition of the Macao International Film and Video Festival to take the top accolade, the Jury’s Award. The competition’s long-awaited results were released yesterday at the Macao Indies 2015 Award Presentation where Alex Law, a veteran film director and screenwriter from Hong Kong (HK) on the jury, told media that the city’s indie film industry has already reached an admirable standard despite being in its infancy.
Despite being impressed by the young local filmmakers’ efforts and their excellent products, Law reckoned that the local animation and feature films still needed to work harder to keep themselves abreast of their counterparts in documentary production, which the three judges regarded as exceptionally “outstanding” among the entries this year. According to him, editing and storytelling were the weaknesses of the above two categories, which have to be further strengthened.
Even so, the 44-minute feature production, depicting one’s retrospect of puppy love based on the topic of the city’s handover in 1999, still won the hearts of the jury with its commercial-level cinematography. Emily Chan, the film’s writer-director, told the media after the award presentation that she came to realize the balance between creativity and reality through her work, which took two months to finish.
“There are struggles in my heart. As a screenwriter, I would be as free as possible in writing, unaware of the actual restraints; yet as a director, you’d know the budget and something unattainable. Both these two mentalities have contained me when I was creating the story,” said the awardee.
Another challenge was the additional attention to the film’s actors, almost all of who were new actors, besides the female protagonist. Chan needed to teach the newbies how to better portray their roles.
Besides the top award, the competition also features four other awards. Chao Koi Wang’s “A Boy’s Prayer” received the Commendation Award for Short Film, while Cobi Lou took the Commendation for Animation for her six-minute “C-La in Macao.”
The Commendation for Feature Film went to “Iec Long” by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata whereas Pedro Cardeira’s “Mio Pang Fei” obtained the prize for “Best Story.”
Pedro Lencastre, Programming and Marketing Manager at the Macao Cultural Centre, said the film festival has seen an “astonishing revolution” over the past eight years as the films and videos have been substantially improving in many regards.
Feng Yu, mainland director in charge of the Art De Vivre in Shenzhen, reckoned Macau has reached a “critical line,” meaning the filmmakers were capable of dealing with longer films, given the cinematographic experience accumulated over the previous years. Staff reporter