The growing Asian event also announced that it is adding contemporary Chinese cinema and family film sections for its upcoming third edition in December.
Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige will serve as international jury president at the Macau International Film Festival’s upcoming third edition, to be held Dec. 8-14 in the southern Chinese casino enclave.
Kaige is famously the only Chinese filmmaker ever to have won Cannes’ Palme d’Or — in 1993 for Farewell My Concubine. His most recent film was the big-budget fantasy spectacle The Legend of the Cat Demon, a China-Japan co-production released last year.
The international strand is the Macau festival’s main competition section. It is dedicated exclusively to films by first- and second-time filmmakers and awards a prize of $60,000 for best feature.
“That he has agreed to be our jury president this year is a great honor to our festival,” Macau’s artistic director Mike Goodridge said Wednesday of Kaige’s appointment. “With a 35-year filmography spanning Yellow Earth (1984) to last year’s dizzyingly spectacular Legend of the Demon Cat, he pioneered a new era in Chinese cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, yet continues to challenge himself today with the same energy, ambition and command of the medium across many different genres.”
Goodridge and his team also announced some additions to Macau’s usual program for the third edition. This year, the festival will be adding a showcase called “New Chinese Cinema,” a selection of four to six films representing the programming team’s picks of the best new Chinese-language cinema of 2018. The fest also is adding a “For All the Family” strand, which will screen a small collection of family-film favorites from around the world.
As in the first two editions of the event, this year’s Macau festival will again include: a gala section of mainstream, crowd-pleasing titles; Flying Daggers, a selection of international genre films; the Best of Fest Panorama, gathering the best film-festival features of the year; the Director’s Choice Retrospective, in which well known Asian and international directors pick their favorite classic genre flicks; one or two retrospectives; and special presentations related to special guests or lifetime achievement award honorees.
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