South Korea’s Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) and China’s Youku have initiated their Asian collaboration project to nurture new filmmakers with master directors.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul from Thailand, Im Sang-soo from Korea, Naomi Kawase from Japan, and Wang Xiaoshuai from China will each make a short film and mentor a newcomer who will also be making a short of their own.

The project will result in eight short films funded by Youku that will world premiere in Busan this October, and one winning newcomer who will get feature film support from the major Chinese video hosting website.

Busan film fest programmers along with the four participating masters will vote on the shorts to decide which one of the four newcomers should win.

BIFF selected three newcomers and Youku selected one. They are: 2009 Asian Film Academy (AFA) alumnus Phuttiphong Aroonpheng from Thailand, 2014 AFA alumnus Asimta Shrish from Nepal, Lee Han Jong from Korea - who had Working Day in BIFF’s 2014 Korean shorts competition, and Cheng Liang from China.

The project is based on the memorandum of understanding BIFF and Youku signed at last year’s Busan fest.

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