Singapore films, 'Wet Season' and 'A Land Imagined', pick up 10 Golden Horse Award nominations
SINGAPORE — Two local films, Wet Season and A Land Imagined, have received a total of 10 nominations for the Golden Horse Awards.
The Golden Horse Award nominations were announced on Tuesday (1 Oct). The awards, given out annually in Taiwan, are the most prestigious Mandarin-language film awards.
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Wet Season was written and directed by Anthony Chen of Ilo Ilo fame. The film picked up six nominations for Best Narrative Feature, Best Director, Best Leading Actress (Yeo Yann Yan), Best Supporting Actor (Koh Jia Ler and Yang Shi Bin), and Best Original Screenplay.
A Land Imagined, directed by Yeo Siew Hua and starring local actor Peter Yu, was nominated for four awards: Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Film Score, Best Film Editing and Best Sound Effects.
Wet Season is about a teacher who faces problems in her marriage and in school, and forms an unlikely friendship with a student.
A Land Imagined (which can be watched on Netflix, by the way), is about a police detective who investigates the case of a migrant worker who goes missing.
A Land Imagined won the Golden Leopard, the top award at the Locarno Film Festival, in 2018. Last week, it was submitted as Singapore’s entry for the Academy Awards' Best International Feature Film category, previously known as the Best Foreign Language Film category.
Chen worked on Wet Season with his previous cast of award-winning film Ilo Ilo, including Yeo Yann Yann and Koh Jia Ler. Ilo Ilo won four awards at the Golden Horse Awards in 2013, for Best Original Screenplay, Best New Director, Best Supporting Actress and Best Feature Film.
In a press release by Giraffe Pictures and Golden Village Pictures, Chen said, “The Golden Horse Awards has been career-changing for me with the accolades for Ilo Ilo in 2013. It gives me so much joy to be recognised again by the most highly regarded awards for Chinese-speaking cinema.”
Malaysian actress Yeo Yann Yann said, “I am very thankful for the recognition from the Golden Horse Awards. It is already an honour to be nominated. I hope that more people can get to watch Wet Season and I can’t wait to bring the movie back to Singapore in November.”
Yeo Siew Hua told Variety after A Land Imagined was submitted to the Academy Awards, “A Land Imagined is a tribute to Singapore and those who helped to build this migrant nation. So we are thrilled that it will represent our country on a stage as big as the Oscars.”
The Golden Horse Awards will be announced on 23 November.
The full list of the 2019 Golden Horse Award nominees can be found here.
