NTU emerges as biggest winners — again — at this year’s National Youth Film Awards

SINGAPORE — For the third year running, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) bagged the most number of awards at the National Youth Film Awards (NYFA).

NTU walked away with 13 of the 23 awards presented to emerging youth filmmakers from local Institutions of Higher Learning (IHLs) on Saturday (22 July).

The university won 13 awards last year, and five in the NYFA’s inaugural edition in 2015.

The prestigious Best Picture award went to a team of NTU students behind Changi, an eight-minute short film exploring themes of immigration and family ties through a conversation in a taxi between a young immigrant mother and her son living in Singapore.

Director, Shoki Lin, a 23-year-old third-year NTU student studying Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Digital Filmmaking, said the film was partially inspired by his experience as a 14-year-old “delinquent child”, when his mother had to leave for Japan to take care of his grandparents. The win, he said, was “unexpected”.

The Japanese-Chinese Singaporean said: “I wanted to write something about transnational families. We know that there are (many) in Singapore, where there are different people from all over the place.”

The team walked away with a trophy, S$2,000 cash and other prizes.

The lead actress in the film, Carey Ou, 33, also won the Best Performance award. The China-born actress who has since become a Singapore citizen, acted in the film alongside her real-life son Leon Wen, 6.

Other big winners from the university include Paper Roof by a team of BFA Digital Filmmaking students, and BUANG BAYI — Behind the Baby Hatch by Bachelor of Comm Studies (Honours) students.

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Both clinched three awards each, with the latter, a documentation of the plight of abandoned babies in Malaysia, sweeping the entire documentary category including Fujinon Best Documentary Film, the Best Camera Work in Documentary Film and the Best Editing in a Documentary Film.

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Brenda Jean Yong emerged the biggest student winner in the media category, with a total of three awards for Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing for Paper Roof and Best Production Design for The Becoming.

She described the big win as an “exciting” moment, despite being “in a state of shock”. “Closest to my heart was (my work) for The Becoming. It was really creating a (sci-fi, dystopian) world from scratch with the two directors… I had to build a lot of props,” said the 23-year-old NTU Digital Filmmaking student.

Organised by *SCAPE and co-presented by the National Youth Council (NYC) and DBS Bank, the NYFA 2017 saw over 200 submissions assessed by a 20-member jury panel including Nicholas Chee, Managing Director of Sinema Media, and Awards Director for NYFA; Vikram Channa, Vice President, Production & Development, Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific, Singapore; and David Chua, Chairman, *SCAPE and Chief Executive Officer, National Youth Council.

Said Mr Chee: “The entries for this year’s National Youth Film Awards point to a young generation of local emerging filmmakers who proudly wear their hearts on their sleeves, and are able to translate prevalent issues that they are facing in our society today into quality films that resonate with a local and even international audience.”

80 films were shortlisted this year. Previously opened only to Singaporean and permanent resident (PR) students enrolled in a media-related course at any IHL, this year’s edition had three additional awards in a new non-media student category.

Tan Jian Yan, 18, a Hwa Chong Institution student in the Arts stream, took home the DBS Silver Award in the non-media category for short film Double Take, a romantic comedy about making a romantic comedy. It was his second attempt at making a short film.

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“This gives more opportunities to other aspiring filmmakers (who are not studying media) to try it out. Even a lot of famous directors and filmmakers didn’t actually study filmmaking in college. One of my favourite directors, Wes Anderson, studied philosophy first,” said Tan, who has yet to decide which course to pursue in university.