NEW DELHI: India-born Ishu Patel will head the animation jury at the 18th Shanghai International Film Festival while the Russian film-maker Andrey Zvyganitsev will be the President of the Golden Goblet Awards jury. The Festival is being held from 13 to 21 June.
Ishu Patel, an animation film director/producer and educator, joined the National Film Board of Canada to study animation in 1972. For twenty-five years under the NFB mandate, Patel produced and directed personal animated films and mentored young filmmakers. There he adapted and developed several notable techniques: the Norman McLaren technique of multiple passes and variable exposures he employed for the abstract film Perspectrum; the under-lit plasticene technique he discovered and developed for Afterlife and Top Priority; under-lit pin holes with multiple passes he developed for the film Paradise; and the procedures for moving thousands of tiny beads under an ever zooming camera he developed in The Bead Game which was nominated for an Oscar in 1977.
He co-produced animation with NHK of Japan and Channel Four of Britain, and contributed many French language segments to Sesame Street for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. His many international awards include the British Academy Award, two Oscar nominations, the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, Grand Prix at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, and Grand Prix at the Montreal World Film Festival.
Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan received the Golden Peacock for the Best Film at the International Film Festival of India in Goa in December last year.
It also won Best Screenplay at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. The film was also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Academy Awards. The drama, about one man’s crusade against his small town’s corrupt mayor, will screen at the festival this year.
The festival has also announced that this year’s Golden Goblet competition will have a Best Documentary and jury will be headed by Malcolm Clarke.
SIFF also announced that this year’s edition will include a Takakura Ken retrospective held in association with the Motion Pictures Producers Association of Japan Inc and the Tokyo International Film Festival.
