Asia Pacific Screen Awards wins its own national award for marketing

25.11.08

The highly successful Queensland-based Asia Pacific Screen Awards has won the export prize in the 2008 National Multicultural Marketing Awards announced tonight in Sydney.

The Multicultural Marketing Awards run by the Community Relations Commission of NSW are now in their 19th year of focussing attention on the social and economic value of cultural diversity.

This year export winner, the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, known as APSA, promotes the excellence of film in the Asia Pacific Region and honours filmmakers across a region covering four billion people, one third of the earths surface and half the world's film output.

APSA is a subsidiary of the Queensland Government's Events Corporation and works in partnership with CNN International, UNESCO and FIAPF - the International Federation of Film Producers Associations.

The Asia Pacific Screen Awards attract the top names with the best films from the previous twelve months from right across the region. Winners of the 2008 awards announced this month on the Gold coast included films from Iran, India, Korea, Turkey and Australia.

The goal is to promote outstanding work in film to a global audience, to encourage international collaboration by filmmakers so as to achieve greater understanding of the region's culture and to recognise the creativity found in the vast Asia Pacific region. In doing so, the idea is to take on the world and to try to reverse the dominant recognition given to the North American and European film axis.

Congratulating the winners, the Chair of the Community Relations Commission, Stepan Kerkyasharian said: "What we have exported in this case is our great knowledge, position in Asia, our language and cultural skills and our great commitment and success in the world of film."

"The APSA project's team includes a good many bi-lingual and trilingual Australians with Asian and French backgrounds. Queensland interpreters fluent in Farsi, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese were used throughout the year of planning for the first awards."

"So many exciting things like this are happening in Australia because of our cultural diversity. This is just one wonderful development. Australia's own cultural diversity, especially the large Asian and Pacific components of the population, coupled with our great international reputation in the film industry, make us the ideal hub for the Asia Pacific Film community."

"This success must certainly spark some ideas in other fields where our diversity can be turned into profit and prestige," Mr Kerkyasharian said.