Omar wins best film at Asia Pacific Screen Awards

Scroll down for full list of winners

David Gerson, who produced the film alongside Waleed F Zuaiter and writer/director Hany Abu-Assad, accepted the award at the ceremony at Brisbane’s City Hall in Australia.

APSA organisers said Omar is the first feature to be fully funded by the film industry in Palestine.

The jury also decided to award two Jury Grand Prizes to the film Television from Bangladesh and to Ritesh Batra for his direction of The Lunchbox. Batra also won the top award for his screenplay for this film, set in Mumbai.

It was Anthony Chen who won the directing category with his debut film Ilo Ilo from Singapore, with special mentions given to Emir Baigazin for Harmony Lessons and Hiner Saleem for My Sweet Pepper Land.

Cultural worth is one of the judging criteria at the APSAs – which cover 70 countries – and the UNESCO Award best represents this. It was awarded to Iran’s The Painting Pool.

The two acting awards went to China’s Zhang Ziyi for her role in martial arts biopic The Grandmaster and to Korea’s Lee Byung-hun for his two roles in Masquerade, the fourth-highest grossing Korean film.

“Omar is a film that has already been acknowledged by the artistic directors of festivals across New Zealand and Australia and now it’s won best film,” said Paul Wiegard, joint managing director of Australian distributor Madman, who was at the ceremony.

He feels a certain amount of ownership as Madman acquired Omar after seeing it at Cannes, where it won a special jury prize after screening in Un Certain Regard.

“It takes that level of acceptance for these films to have a chance commercially,” he added, referring to both Omar and Ilo Ilo, another of the winning films for which he acquired local rights after Cannes.

Eighteen of the films nominated had Australian distribution before the APSAs with Madman having more than half that number. Documentary The Act of Killing and The Lunchbox, which Madman decided to hold back from festivals because of its broad appeal, were its other two winners this evening.

Wiegard praised the APSAs for their timeliness: “Omar, Ilo Ilo and The Lunchbox have all premiered only in the last six months. The awards will help us place the films on airlines, on national television and, of course, get theatrical audiences.”

Six of the nominated films were in contention for the Academy Awards and jury president, Indian writer/director Shyam Benegal, said he was “most impressed” with the quality.

“They represent the diverse cultures of the Asia Pacific region. More than half of the world’s films originate from the Asia Pacific region, which makes the APSA Awards in Brisbane among the more important competitive film awards in the world.”

The APSA ceremony is broadcast to 46 countries across the region via the ABC’s Australia Network and will air across Australia on SBS One on Dec 22.

Full list of winners

Best Feature Film
Omar (Palestine). Producers: Hany Abu-Assad, Waleed F. Zuaiter, David Gerson  

BEST CHILDREN’S FEATURE FILM
Juvenile Offender (Republic of Korea). Producer: Park Joo-young  

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM
The Act of Killing (Denmark, Norway, United Kingdom). Producers: Signe Byrge Sørensen, Joram Ten Brink, Christine Cynn, Anne Köhncke, Joshua Oppenheimer, Michael Uwemedimo, anonymous Indonesian producers. Co-producers Torstein Grude, Bjarte Mørner Tveit, Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn. 

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
Koo! Kin-Dza-Dza (Russian Federation). Producers Sergey Selyanov, Leonid Yarmolnik, Yuri Kushnerev, Oleg Urushev, Konstantin Ernst.

ACHIEVEMENT IN DIRECTING
Anthony Chen for Ilo Ilo (Singapore).

Special mentions: Emir Baigazin for Harmony Lessons (Kazakhstan, Germany, France), and Hiner Saleem for My Sweet Pepper Land (Iraqi Kurdistan, France, Germany)

BEST SCREENPLAY
Ritesh Batra for The Lunchbox (India, France, Germany)

ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATOGRAPHY
Lu Yue for Back to 1942 (People’s Republic of China)  

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR
Lee Byung-hun in Masquerade (Republic of Korea)

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS
Zhang Ziyi in The Grandmaster (Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China)

JURY GRAND PRIZE (shared)
Television (Bangladesh). Producer Mostofa Sarwar Farooki. Co-producer Mahboob Rahman.

Ritesh Batra for The Lunchbox (India, France, Germany)

UNESCO AWARD
The Painting Pool (Islamic Republic of Iran). Producer Manoochehr Mohammadi