Filmmakers competing in the Asian New Talent section of the 28th Shanghai International Film Festival gathered for a press meeting to discuss the inspirations and methods behind four films, spanning subjects from marginalized communities in the Arab world to human relationships with the natural world.
Zaid Abu Hamdan, director of the Jordanian entry “Boomah,” said his lead character grew out of real encounters with three women he had met on the streets of Jordan. The film follows an orphaned girl at the bottom of a patriarchal society who works her way toward power while wrestling with family trauma and questions of identity. Producer Ahmad Abu Koush expressed confidence that the film’s emotional core would translate across linguistic and cultural boundaries, arguing that audiences worldwide would recognize the suffering it depicts.
“Each of them carried the scars of a difficult childhood, yet beneath their hardened exteriors, they longed for love, for a home, and for someone to care for them,” Abu Hamdan said. “Those contradictions – the toughness and the tenderness – are precisely what so many marginalized people share.”
The Indian film “Hunter’s Moon,” directed by Ridham Janve, takes a different approach, centering on a hunter who returns to discover his cached prey has been disturbed. Janve, who frequently sets his work in mountain landscapes, described nature in the film as operating like a mirror that alternately flatters and humbles its human subjects. Producer Kartikeya Narayan Singh said the production team extended its environmental concerns to the shoot itself, forgoing plastic materials and running the entire operation on solar power.
Also present were the makers of “Strangers in the Mountain” and “Her First Taste,” two Chinese productions that received support from the SIFF Project over the past three years. Director Wan Bo said “Strangers in the Mountain,” a suspense film that opens on a seven-year-old cold case, uses distinct regional dialects to differentiate its characters and draws on the visual grammar of traditional Chinese ink painting through recurring black-and-white sequences.
“Language is inseparable from character, as it is deeply rooted in the process of a character’s growth,” Wan said. “The environment and geographical context in which each character grows up endow them with a unique and distinctive charm.”
“Her First Taste,” directed by Gong Yiwen, follows a writing-obsessed girl navigating identity and first love in a campus setting. Gong said she employed a documentary-style technique, asking actors to internalize their lines and then abandon them so their on-set behavior would read as spontaneous.
Producer Qian Yini said: “We devoted significant effort to casting, and the final cast members delivered outstanding performances. This film makes me recall the deep emotional connection with my closest friends, and I hope viewers will experience the same.”
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