Luang Prabang Film Festival (LPFF) – an annual celebration of Southeast Asian cinema – has announced that its 10th annual event will take place online from 4 to 10 December 2020.
As always, the festival will include a carefully curated selection of the best in contemporary ASEAN cinema, but this year’s program will also bring back feature selections from the event’s first ten years and highlight MEKONG 2030, the award-winning anthology film released by LPFF itself earlier this year.
Founded in 2009, LPFF has begun its second decade of supporting regional and local cinema through its annual festival and year-long funding and educational opportunities for filmmakers.
Once again, Director of Programming Bree Fitzgerald and LPFF’s Motion Picture Ambassadors (MPAs) have procured a line-up representative of nine Southeast Asian countries that will be available throughout the duration of the festival.
Consistent with past editions, all the films will be completely free, with streaming access expanded to viewers across the ten ASEAN countries: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
In-line with this dynamic year, LPFF will present its inaugural shorts program alongside its usual programming. “Many filmmakers start off in this (shorts) category,” says Fitzgerald. “As an organization that prioritizes supporting emerging talent, it makes sense that we would create a space for filmmakers producing at this length.”
LPFF will also include a special “From the Archives” program, which will highlight selected films from past festivals, revealing these special offerings over the course of the week.
After a year on the festival circuit, LPFF’s film anthology MEKONG 2030 will return home to Luang Prabang to partake in the six-day event. The anthology, which consists of five short films from the Mekong region countries, has already been selected to screen in over 20 film festivals across the world, and was most recently awarded Best Narrative Feature at the Dili International Film Festival.
LPFF has also released the visual identity for this year’s festival, which brings the iconic Luang Prabang outdoor theatre inside the viewer’s home. Executed by Lao artist Manilla Chounlamountri, the bright colored illustration exhibits a community coming together through film.
“We’re well-known for bringing audiences to a film festival in a town without a movie theater,” said Executive Director Sean Chadwell. “This year, we can’t bring the audiences, so we’re taking the festival to them.”
Source: Inside Out