IN CONVERSATION WITH U-WEI HAJI SAARI
11 NOV, FRI | 4.00PM - 5.30PM | BLACKBOX | RM10
Over a career spanning 30 years, U-Wei has directed 16 TV dramas, 6 films, 3 stage plays and also authored books. His first film, Perempuan, Isteri & Jalang (Woman, Wife & Whore, 1993) took 5 awards at the Malaysia Film Festival, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay. His film Kaki Bakar (The Arsonist, 1995), was screened under Cannes’s Un Certain Regard, as well as at Berlin, Montreal, Nantes, Fribourg, New York, Busan and Singapore, winning the Grand Prix at Brussels. With a grant from NHK Japan, he made Jogho (The Bull Fighter, 1997), which has been invited to festivals in Singapore, Busan, Cinemanila and Nantes. The Nantes Film Festival had a retrospective of U-Wei’s films in 2001. His short film, Sepohon Rambutan Indah Kepunyaan Ku di Tanjong Rambutan (My Beautiful Rambutan Tree in Tanjung Rambutan, 2006) was chosen for the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes 2006.
In 2011, U-Wei received a grant to make Hanyut (Adrift, 2013), a film that had a cast and crew from Malaysia, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Australia & Poland. The film has since screened in Dubai, Poland, Jogjakarta, Kolkata and Australia, being nominated for Best Screenplay at Brisbane’s Asia Pacific Screen Awards. After a commercial screening in Indonesia in 2014 under the title, Gunung Emas Almayer (Almayer's Golden Mountain), Hanyut will meet the Malaysian audience on 24th November, 2016.
HANYUT, based on the novel, Almayer’s Folly by Joseph Conrad, is the story of Almayer, a Dutch trader struggling to survive in Malaysia at the turn of the 19th century. Almayer's dream of finding a mythical gold mountain is at odds with his plotting wife, colonial authorities, the political machinations of a local chief with Arab traders and his daughter's love for a freedom-fighting Malay prince.
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