Five outstanding individuals have been tapped to select this year’s cinematic harvest to receive Cinemalaya’s Balanghai trophies.
The jury who will decide the fate of the competing filmmakers in Cinemalaya 19 includes actress Shamaine Centenera Buencamino, cinematographer Neil Daza, director-visual artist Raya Martin, festival programmer Park Sungho, and film producer-curator Lorna Tee. All jury members have made their marks in both the local and international cinema scene.
Buencamino is a multi-awarded actress with almost four decades of experience in theater, film and television, winning the Outstanding Female Lead Performance in a Play for “Madonna Brava” (2009) and “Ang Kalungkutan ng Reyna” (2008).
Award-winning Filipino cinematographer and former p[hotojournalist Neil Daza has shot some of the most remarkable films such as “Dekada ’70,” “Feng Shui,” “Badil,” “Bwaya,” “Signal Rock,” “Oda sa Wala” (Ode To Nothing), “Fan Girl,” and “About Us But Not About Us,” one of the featured exhibition films in Cinemalaya 2023.
A recipient of the CCP Thirteen Artists Awards, Raya Martin is the first Filipino director to screen two films — the breakthrough film “Independencia” in Un Certain Regard section, and urban noir “Manila” in the Special Screening section — at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009.
Park Sungho majored in film editing at the Cinematography Department at Chung-Ang University. He worked full-time for the Busan International Film Festival from 2007 to 2013, where he served as program coordinator for Asian cinema and manager for the Asian Film Academy. Currently, Park is the festival programmer of the Busan International Film Festival and helps promote Cambodian and Southeast Asian cinema globally.
A film producer, programmer, trainer, and curator, Lorna Tee has been producing her films and series for an international audience through Paperheart, her Malaysian production company, and Amsterdam-based film company An Original Picture. She is a much awarded director who earned the Filmmaker of the Year award from the Chinese Film Association of Malaysia in 2021 and was listed in The Hollywood Reporter’s Next Gen Asia: Class of 2010.
The juries for the NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) Award are filmmaker Sigrid Andrea P. Bernardo, filmmaker-critic Utpal Borpujari, and Cinemalaya founding member Edward Delos Santos Cabagnot.
Cinemalaya will run until August 13, at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC), Tanghalang Ignacio B. Gimenez (CCP Blackbox Theater), and selected Ayala Malls Cinemas.
