16th Unimas Mini Film Festival to set record by moving online this year

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KUCHING: The longest running short film festival in Malaysia, the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (Unimas) Mini Film Festival, is moving online this year, setting a record as the first on-site film festival that moves entirely online due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Unimas Mini Film Festival programmer Yow Chong Lee said the festival  which entered its 16th edition this year is fully handled by its Cinematography Programme students and lecturers.

“Organising a film festival online is not new but migrating a film festival that has been traditionally organised on-site with the attendance of physical audiences and filmmakers is an entirely new challenge for many film festival organisers in the world, ” he said in a statement.

Inspired by the motto ‘Mini in scale, Big in ambition’, he said the organisers had attempted to bring the best films with great creative voices to meet audiences through the Mini Film Festival platform.

“With about 200 entries of short films submitted by Malaysian filmmakers this year, the 10 best films were selected as finalists for each of the two categories, namely MAS See Films: Open Category and MAS See Films: Students’ Category,” he said.

Yow said these nominees comprising up-and-coming young filmmakers in their early or mid-20s will walk away with cash prizes of up to RM2,400.

Some of these films will be world-premiered and meet the audience for the first time such as ‘In the Middle of Nowhere’ by Sarawakian filmmaker Christopher Jing Ling and ‘Burn’ by Thiyagu Govindan, a graduate from the Multimedia University (MMU).

Members of the jury for this festival are award winning directors with diverse industrial background, including Sari Dalena from the Philippines, Amerta Kusuma (Indonesia), Nadiah Hamzah (Malaysia) and Ho Hock Doong (Malaysia).

Members of the public who are interested to watch the festival or attend the webinars are encouraged to register through http://bit.do/16thMFF in order to receive streaming links and online movie screening links for free. For other enquiries, they can contact 011-31358840. — Bernama