End clap for the International Festival of Asian Cinemas (Fica) in Vesoul on the evening of February 8. The organizers awarded the Golden Cycle to the feature film, Yanagawa shot by Chinese director Zhang Lu.
The film tells the story of two Chinese brothers who travel to Yanagawa, Japan to find the woman they both loved when they were young. This one, become a singer in a bar, regularly covers the titles of John Lennon. The jury hailed “a compelling story” and “perfectly told”.
This is the second time that Zhang Lu has won the Cyclo d’or in Vesoul. In 2006, he had already been awarded for Mang Zhong (grain in ear), the story of a Korean-Chinese woman raising her young son alone.
Iranian actress Leïla Hatami, president of the jury, was awarded a Cyclo d’honneur for her entire career. She had played the main role in A separationreleased in 2011, which had won a harvest of awards including the Oscar and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, the César for Best Foreign Language Film and the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
Fica also singled out the Japanese director Kôji Fukada, present in Vesoul, “for all of his work”. This 28th edition of the festival offered a retrospective of his entire filmography, including some films never screened outside Japan, in particular The chairhis very first achievement.
Among the other awards, the jury singled out Along the seaby the Japanese Fujimoto Akio, on the tribulations of three young Vietnamese trainees in Japan, and Aloners, by South Korean director Hong Sung-eun, which evokes the journey of a call center employee whose life changes when her neighbor is found dead. The Audience Award went to two feature films ex-aequo: NoChoiceby Iranian director Reza Dormishian, and No Land’s Manby Bangladeshi Mostofa Sarwar Farooki.
The first edition of the Marc Haaz Prize, named after the festival’s ex-technical director who died in an accident in the summer of 2021, went to The orphanage, by the young Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat. The organizers had scheduled an “Afghan cinema day” during the festival, to draw attention to the plight of Afghan artists since the Taliban took power in Kabul last summer.
The next edition of the festival will be held from February 28 to March 7, 2023.