SGIFF 37 to honour Aamir Khan with Screen Icon Award, screen Lagaan
The Singapore International Film Festival will present its Screen Icon Award to Aamir Khan at its 37th edition, with a special screening of Lagaan marking the film's 25th anniversary.
The Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF) will present its Screen Icon Award to Aamir Khan at its 37th edition. The festival will also hold a special screening of Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India to mark the film's 25th anniversary, with director Ashutosh Gowariker expected to attend.
SGIFF will open with the South Korean thriller The Assassin(s), directed by Hur Jin-ho and starring Yoo Hae-jin, Park Hae-il and Lee Min-ho. Hur, along with supporting cast members Shim Eun-kyung and Park Sung-hoon, will be present at the opening.
As previously announced, the festival's Cinema Honorary Award — its top prize for lasting contributions to Asian cinema — will go to Japanese filmmaker Kore-eda Hirokazu. His film Look Back will screen as part of the programme.
SGIFF executive director Jeremy Chua said the edition brings some of the most respected talents and consequential work being made across Asia to Singapore. He added that the festival has reconsidered how audiences encounter it, citing new presentation formats and points of entry, a more intuitive ticketing platform, an industry programme expanded into a resource centre for artists, technicians and storytellers at every stage of practice, and a new free-to-attend section at the intersection of creativity and technology that attends to the forms storytelling will take next.
The line-up spotlights more than 25 Singapore productions and co-productions that have earned recognition at festivals including Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, Venice and Melbourne.
Running from October 21 to November 1, the festival will introduce a Junior Explorers section with sensory-friendly screenings for younger audiences, opening with the stop-motion feature Brave Cat. Its Undercurrent section will open with three live performances: the Taiwanese puppetry piece Corporeal Forms: Four Stories, the live video gaming work The Compression Zone, and the analog film and music performance Imagination + The Rest Is My Ghost.