Professor Zakir Hossain Raju, the head of Media and Communication Department at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB), has been invited for the second time to join the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) as Netpac jury president for Asian Cinema Award.
Netpac stands for Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema, a worldwide organization founded in 1990. The organization was founded to promote a greater understanding and appreciation of Asian films and film-makers, at a time when Asian cinema was just coming into its own, but was relatively unknown both regionally and internationally.
Professor Raju is a board member of Netpac. Previously, he served as Netpac jury president for Asian Cinema Award in the 44th edition of IFFR in 2015.
The 49th edition of IFFR will take place from January 22 to February 2, 2020. Professor Raju will leave Dhaka on Saturday to join the film festival. He will preside over the Netpac-formed jury board, which consists of two world-renowned film producers - Arleen Cuevas and Dan Koh.
Films directed by Arleen, "Independencia" and "Manila" were in the official selection of Cannes Film Festival, and Dan’s film "Demons" was in competition in Berlin and Busan film festivals. Dan's "A Land Imagined" won the Best Film award at the Locarno Film Festival.
Professor Raju specializes in teaching and doing research on Asian cinemas. He authored the book "Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity," published in 2015. Professor Raju has also been one of the prominent driving forces behind developing the study of Asian cinemas, in South Asia for the last three decades. He also developed a semester-long course on Korean cinema, which he has been teaching at IUB for five years now. While Korean cinema is taught at leading universities around the world, this course at IUB is the only such course taught in South Asia.
Professor Raju also served as a jury member in several major international film festivals held in France, USA, Australia, and South Korea. He is the former president of Bangladesh Short Film Forum. He had also scripted and directed ten short and documentary films during the 1990s, which were featured in some international film festivals in the USA, Germany, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, Romania, Japan, and Malaysia. His film "Beyond the Borders" has won over Bangladeshi-Japanese families, and also won a Jury Commendation award in European Anthropological Film Festival in 1997.
IFFR is considered as one of the oldest and most prestigious film festivals in the world alongside Cannes, Berlin, Venice, and Toronto.
IFFR is also one of the largest audience and industry-driven film festivals in the world. The festival offers a high quality line-up of carefully selected fiction and documentary feature films, short films, and media art. During the twelve festival days, hundreds of film-makers and other artistes - from all over the world - present their work to a large audience. There were 327,000 admissions, and around 2,400 film professionals in 2019.
IFFR actively supports new and adventurous film-making talents through numerous film industry initiatives including the co-production marketor CineMart, and its Hubert Bals Fund.