The defining word at this year’s Asia Pacific Screen Awards was not a title but a method. Every film in the Best Film race was stitched together across borders, and the prize went to one that wears its patchwork lightly: Levan Koguashvili’s Guria, a deadpan Georgian comedy about a stubborn hazelnut farmer, financed with partners from Switzerland and Luxembourg to Norway and Saudi Arabia.

As Variety first reported, Koguashvili shared the award with fellow producers Olena Yershova and Boris Frumin, his co-writer. Guria saw off Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s All of a Sudden, which had led the nominations and went home empty-handed, along with Abinash Bikram Shah’s Elephants in the Fog and Shahrbanoo Sadat’s No Good Men. The international jury was presided over by cinematographer Mandy Walker.

The win hands Georgia’s Academy Awards campaign a timely calling card. Set in 1992 in the impoverished, post-Soviet west of the country, the film follows Zuriko (Kakhaber Tcholadze), a widower who refuses the low price Italian buyers offer for his harvest while his best friend hunts for a new wife his formidable former mother-in-law might approve. It premiered in the Spotlight section in Venice in September and is Georgia’s entry for Best International Feature at the 99th Oscars, a path Koguashvili already walked with Brighton 4th, the country’s submission for the 94th Academy Awards.

Best Director went to Sompot Chidgasornpongse for 9 Temples to Heaven, another Oscar submission, from Thailand, and his first fiction feature. In it, nine members of a Thai family race to visit nine temples in a single day after a fortuneteller predicts the grandmother’s imminent death. Sompot spent years as assistant director to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who produces here; the film opened at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and later won the Sutherland Award for best first feature in London. Myanmar’s Aung Phyoe received a special mention for Fruit Gathering.

Sadat, the Afghan filmmaker, took the Jury Grand Prize for No Good Men, while Nepal’s Pushpa Thing Lama won Best Performance for Elephants in the Fog and Korean newcomer Sim Su-bin won Best New Performer for The World Before. The Violinist, co-directed by Singapore’s Ervin Han and Spain’s Raúl García, won Best Animated Film, and Vietnamese cinematographer Nguyễn Vinh Phúc was honored for Hearing. APSA chair Tracey Vieira said what had been most rewarding was “seeing the strength of collaboration behind these films, alongside the emergence of exciting new filmmaking talent.”

The Motion Picture Association’s APSA Academy Film Fund backed 9 Temples to Heaven in 2021, a point its Asia Pacific president, Urmila Venugopalan, pressed in her congratulations: support matters “from the earliest stages of development.” On the same night, the fund handed five new projects US$10,000 each, among them Payal Kapadia’s A Memory of Being Here. It is the same script-stage money that, five years earlier, seeded the film that had just won Best Director.

Tags: co-production, film awards, Guria, Levan Koguashvili, 9 Temples to Heaven, Asia Pacific Screen Awards