The Sundance Institute and XRM Media have announced that Sundance Film Festival: Asia will be hosting its first offline edition from August 25 to 28 in Jakarta, Indonesia.
The Asian leg of the prolific film festival was announced last year and made its debut in September as an online-only event due to the coronavirus pandemic. This August’s film festival in Jakarta will mark its first in-person event.
The festival will offer multiple programming pillars over the course of its three day run: ‘Festival Chat’, ‘Film Screenings’, ‘Meet & Greet Day’ and a ‘Short Film Competition’. Audiences can expect a curated selection of invited guests in entertainment and culture to speak during the ‘Festival Chat’, which will take place on Thursday (25 August) and Friday (26 August).
Four feature films and three documentaries will be screened throughout the three days. The documentary films are Fire of Love, Midwives and Riotsville, USA. As for the feature films, they are Leonor Will Never Die, Brian and Charles, Maika and Blood.
‘Meet & Greet Day’, which falls on Saturday (27 August) will see Kim Yutani (Director of Programming, Sundance Film Festival), Heidi Zwicker (Senior Programmer, Sundance Film Festival), Sara Dosa (Director, Fire of Love), Jim Archer (Director, Brian and Charles), Bradley Rust Gray (Director, Blood), Martika Ramirez Escobar (Director, Leonor Will Never Die), Ham Tran (Director, Maika) and others as they speak about everything that has to do with filmmaking and the Sundance festival.
The winners of the ‘Short Film Competition’ will also be announced during the festival. Film directors with a valid Indonesian passport were given a stipulated window of April 18 to May 31 to submit their films. The requirements were that the films had to run between three to 20 minutes, production dates of the films had to be completed on or after January 1, 2020 and any exact entries for last year’s competition could not be resubmitted.
All programmes will be free, barring the film screenings, which are priced at IDR75,000 per ticket. In order to be of attendance during the ‘Meet & Greet Day’, register here.
The first Sundance Film Festival: Asia took place virtually in 2021, and featured eight films that could only be viewed in Indonesia through the purchase of digital screening passes, along with panels by industrial experts and a short film competition.