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Held on a stunning island in southwest Japan, Cinema at Sea – Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival is dedicated to showcasing cinema from the Pan-Pacific region to East Asian audiences while serving as a gateway to the global film industry.

“Cinema at Sea” aims to evoke the ocean’s spirit, uniting the voices of the islands to deliver a powerful message to the modern world. It explores themes ranging from the challenges of remote geographies and unique indigenous identities to the pressing realities of climate change and the enduring hope for peace in a rapidly evolving world.

Cinema at Sea – Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival has concluded the run of its 2nd edition, from February 22 to March 2 2025, with the award ceremony, and, without further ado, here are all the winners.

Market awards:

The Chimney Sweeper by Shingo Ota

Audience award:

From Island to Island by Kek-huat Lau

Short film:

Daly City...

Sean Hu’s “Ocean Elegy: The Tragedies of Mudan and Ryukyu,” a seven-years-in-the-making documentary exploring a pivotal 1870s incident that reshaped East Asian geopolitics, will world premiere as the opening film of Japan’s Cinema at Sea – Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival.

New Zealand director Miki Magasiva’s “Tinā” is set to close the festival with its Asian premiere. The drama, which marks Magasiva’s directorial debut, follows a Samoan mother (Anapela Polata’ivao) who finds healing through teaching music after losing her daughter in the Christchurch earthquake. The film has already gained attention at festivals including Hawaii, Palm Springs and Perth.

The competitive Pacific Film section features 10 films spanning multiple territories. Masakazu Kaneko’s “River Returns” (Japan) blends fantasy and tradition in a 1958-set drama about a boy’s spiritual journey to halt destructive typhoons. South Korean filmmaker Ryu Yeon-su makes her debut with “Boy in the Pool,” exploring childhood...

The Cinema at Sea – Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival has unveiled the lineup for its second edition, which will take place on the Japanese island prefecture from February 22 to March 2.

The festival is set to open with the world premiere of Ocean Elergy: The Tragedies Of Mudan And Ryukyu, a documentary by Taiwanese filmmaker Sean Hu. The film chronicles the Mudan Incident of 1871, a massacre which served as a pretext for Japan to invade Taiwan and annex the Kingdom of Ryukyu (what is now Okinawa).

The closing film is Tinā, the theatrical debut of directorial Miki Magasiva, who previously directed...

The Cinema at Sea – Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival has unveiled the lineup for its second edition, which will take place on the Japanese island from February 22 to March 2.

The festival is set to open with the world premiere of Ocean Elergy: The Tragedies Of Mudan And Ryukyu, a documentary by Taiwanese filmmaker Sean Hu. The film chronicles the Mudan Incident of 1871, a massacre which served as a pretext for Japan to invade Taiwan and annex the Kingdom of Ryukyu (what is now Okinawa).

The closing film is Tinā, the theatrical debut of directorial Miki Magasiva, who previously directed episodes...

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds Of Kindness, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, are among the films that will screen in CineMasters, the main competition of this month’s Munich International Film Festival (Miff), taking place from June 28 to July in Germany.

Fourteen films are in the running for CineMasters’ €50,000 Arri Award which is presented to the producers of the best international film. Further titles include Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught By The Tides, Rúnar Rúnarsson’s When The Light Breaks, which premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section last month, as well as Jaione Camborda...

Former Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick is returning to the festival scene with a new event called Green Visions Potsdam, which kicks off on May 30 and runs until June 2.

Kosslick, whose 18-year tenure at the Berlinale spanned 2001 to 2019, is festival director of Green Visions Potsdam and has put together a line-up of 18 films addressing issues such as climate protection, sustainability, fast fashion, agriculture and nutrition.

The programme, which Kosslick has selected in collaboration with curator Karen Arikian, opens with the German premieres of French documentary filmmaker Jean-Albert Lièvre’s Whale Nation and UK director Mahalia Belo’s survival thriller The End We Start From,...

The 50th Annual Seattle International Film Festival (Siff) wrapped up on Sunday and announced the winners of the 2024 Golden Space Needle Audience and Juried Competition Awards.

The festival began on May 9 and screened 261 films representing 84 countries with “62% of the feature films were created by first or second-time filmmakers; 43% were created by women or nonbinary filmmakers; 35% of filmmakers identify as a Bipoc director; and nearly 60% are currently without U.S. distribution and may not screen commercially in the United States,” according to Siff.

Siff holds two categories of competition: juried and audience based. Juried competitions include five feature subcategories including the Official Competition, New American Cinema Competition, New Directors Competition, Ibero-American Competition and Documentary Competition. Short film categories include live action, animation and documentary.

In addition, over 32,000 ballots were submitted for the Golden Space Needle Awards (Gsna). Films judged through the GSNAs are selected by audience members through post-screening ballots. The categories include best film,...

Through Rocks And Clouds tells the story of the son of a family of alpaca herders. Feliciano (Alberth Merma is beyond excited at the prospect that Peru could qualify for the football World Cup. But there is trouble brewing closer to home thanks to the dirty tricks of a local mining company. Director Franco García Becerra mixing a fantastical element of a lake spirit Auki Tayta in with his naturalistic drama in this family-friendly film. We caught up with Becerra and Annemarie Gunkel, who co-wrote the script with Alicia Quispe, to talk about blending the real and the imagined while keeping a child's viewpoint.

What made you want to tell this story?

Franco García Becerra: The script was written by Annemarie Gunkel and Alicia Quispe, and it's interesting because this story started with an image Anna...

A Walk in the Clouds: Becerra Mines Escapism and Innocence in Quiet Drama

A dwindling group of alpaca herders find themselves on the verge of violent displacement in Franco Garcia Becerra’s sophomore film Through the Rocks and Clouds. In essence, it’s a tale as old as time, and universal to any period or place. As is the filmmaker’s choice to frame the narrative through the eyes of a child, more or less oblivious to the anxiety and despair of his bewildered parents. The original Spanish language title, Raiz, which translates to ‘root,’ has more thematic resonance than the poetic but rather vague ambiguity of the English language approach, which seems to further soften the blow of a dark package focusing on the small bits of peripheral hope thanks to the distraction of the Peruvian national football team on the verge of competing in the World Cup.…

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If you want to pick a cute animal to wander about at the heart of your film, alpacas are hard to beat - none more so than an alpaca named Ronaldo who has star billing here and who will even get a haircut matching his footballer namesake in good time. This Peruvian drama from Franco García Becerra is shot in the Quecha language and features both similarly stunning landscapes and cute alpacas to those captured in Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s Bolivian-set Utama.

The film also shares some of its environmental underpinning with Grisi’s film about the challenges faced by those who live in these sorts of rural areas, although Becerra’s film is much more family-friendly. Older children will love eight-year-old Feliciano (Alberth Merma), who has two passions in his life - his alpacas, which he herds with his dog Rambo, and, as you might guess from his favourite alpaca’s name,...

Paris-based Luxbox, one of Europe’s most prominent sales agents and an occasional producer of Spanish-language art house titles, has snagged worldwide rights to Peru’s “Through Rocks and Clouds” (“Raiz”) ahead of its world premiere at Berlinale’s Generation Kplus sidebar.

Set against stunning vistas of a snowcapped Andes mountain range, the film revolves around Feliciano, an eight-year-old alpaca herder and avid soccer fan who is giddy about Peru’s increasing chances at qualifying for the World Cup.

But a mining company’s exploits threatens his mountaintop village’s way of life, tarnishing his dreams.

“At Luxbox, we are always looking for Latin-American talents, so we are extremely happy to represent this Peruvian pearl directed by Franco Garcia Becerra,” said Luxbox CEO Fiorella Moretti, adding: “The film invites us to see the world through the gaze of a young alpaca herder full of dreams.”

García Becerra hails from Cusco...