2021 MPA APSA Academy Film Fund Recipient

9 TEMPLES TO HEAVEN by Thai writer-director, Sompot Chidgasornpongse, working with the celebrated filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul as his producer.  The film follows a family group on a single day’s pilgrimage to 9 temples seeking spiritual help for their ailing grandmother.  Laced with humour and conflicts, the film offers a rich ensemble of characters and the constantly changing splendour of the temples. 

THE SPELLCASTER OF TAMONTACA by Teng Mangansakan, a leading figure in the new wave of regional cinema in the Philippines. His film draws on his own ethnic background with traditional Indigenous stories in which gender is not defined in physical or Western terms. The spellcaster of the title is Salome, a young woman with psychic gifts whose gender puzzles the Spanish colonialists.  The leading role will be played by Ram Botero, a trans Filipina actress and artist. 

HISTORIA from Georgia, by award-winning writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili – a female director’s telling of a modern fable about a devoted gynaecologist in an ultra-conservative community where abortions are illegal.  Her life is subject to rumours and hatred.  Her deep loneliness hides a terrible secret – that at night she transforms into a sexually voracious beast, roaming in the dark searching for men.   

RED MIST DESCENDING from Iran by one of Iran’s leading female writer-directors, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, in a moving observation of a man in the role of carer – devoted to looking after his sister and her family and assisting persecuted and undocumented people to escape across the border to political safety.  Beautifully visualised against a misty autumnal forest, the film is a deeply-felt story of altruism and hope for humanity in tumultuous times.