Editor

The 11th BARCELONA ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL - BAFF 2009, organised by 100.000 retinas and directed by Amaia Torrecilla and Carlos R. Ríos, will be held between April 30th and May 10th 2009 in Barcelona. In this its 11th season, BAFF will present a selection of 60 feature films produced in Asia throughout the last year. A wide range of interesting innovations will mark ten intense days where top Asian filmmakers will bring their works close to our Mediterranean audience. Among these novelties is the incorporation of BAFF to the list of festivals in which the prestigious NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) Award is granted.

In the Official Competition section an International Jury will select the two awards of the festival: the Golden Durian Award - a 6.000 euros prize courtesy of Casa Asia - will be granted to the best feature film directed by a new talented filmmaker with less than three movies in his credits. Past Golden Durian Awards include Naomi Kawase (Shara), Liu Fendou (Green Hat), Jeon Soo-il (With a Girl of Black Soil), Djamsehd Usmonov (Angel on the Right), Zhang Lu (Grain in Ear) and Lou Ye (Summer Palace). The second prize granted in the Official Competition section is the Cinematk Award, courtesy of Avalon distribution company and Cinematk TV channel. This award consists on the distribution in Spain of the award-winning film.

In the main competitive section of the festival, fourteen movies from countries like Taiwan, Japan, China/Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand will compete for the two main awards. In this year selection the works of debutant filmmakers stand out, but we can not forget the presence of consolidated film directors such as Yu Lik-wai (Plastic City), Brillante Mendoza (Serbis) or Ryosuke Hashiguchi (All Around Us). And last but not least, two of the most awaited films of this year's remarkable crop of Asian films will be screened at BAFF 2009: this year's Tiger award-winning Breathless, by Yang Ik-June and the last Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Language Film, the Japanese hit Departures by Yojiro Takita, which will be a Spanish premiere.