This year’s Busan International Film Festival has named Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui as the recipient of the Camellia Award, presented to filmmakers who have made significant contributions to elevating the status of women in the film industry.

Hui was a leading figure in the Hong Kong New Wave as a director, screenwriter and producer, making her directing debut with The Secret in 1979. She has continued making films consistently since then, building a body of work that includes 27 feature films and two feature-length documentaries, including multiple award winner A Simple Life, which won Best Actress at the Venice film festival for Deanie Ip’s performance in 2011. 

Along the way, she has also won Best Director winner at the Hong Kong Film Awards six times and Best Director winner at the Golden Horse Awards three times. Both A Simple Life and Summer Snow (1995) achieved the rare feat of sweeping Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards.

Hui has also been presented with Lifetime Achievement Awards at the 2012 Asian Film Awards, Asian Filmmaker of the Year Award at Busan film festival in 2014, and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2020 Venice International Film Festival.

“Underlying Hui’s remarkable career and international acclaim is a singular cinematic vision rooted in compassion and humanity, one that has long captured the complexities of Hong Kong society and the spirit of its times,” said Busan film festival in a statement. 

“Spanning a wide range of genres, her films chronicle the everyday lives of ordinary people while weaving intimate personal stories into broader social realities. Her nuanced portrayals of women, particularly those often pushed to the margins, have resonated deeply with audiences across cultures and generations.”

Hui commented on the award: “In my previous years I felt unwilling to receive such taking-stock prizes because I wished to continue making movies. Now that I’m nearly eighty and find it difficult to make a film, I think the prize comes just in time for me to appreciate it more.” 

She added, “I am so happy to return to Busan and meet an audience that is among the most savvy and cinematically literate in the world.”

Busan partnered with Chanel to establish the award, named after Gabrielle Chanel’s favorite flower, which was last year awarded to Taiwanese actress, director and producer Sylvia Chang. 

This year’s Camellia Award will be presented at Busan’s opening ceremony on October 6. As previously announced, the festival has also named Michelle Yeoh as this year’s Asian Filmmaker of the Year. 

Robert is a 17-year-old Congolese refugee in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic (CAR). After his parents are imprisoned, he must care for his four younger siblings while striving to become a musician. That is the story of Congo Boy from director Rafiki Fariala. But it is also his, or at least inspired by his personal story.

The landmark co-production by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the CAR, which world premiered in the Un Certain Regard competition of the Cannes Film Festival, where it won its star Bradley Fiomona Dembeasset the best actor honor in the session, is now unspooling on the big outdoor square in Switzerland, namely the Piazza Grande as part of the  79^th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, on Tuesday, Aug. 11.

Congo Boy‘s cast is led by Dembeasset and also features Christy Djomanda Louba, Pétruche Mbomba, Rosiana Kotozia, Gloria Ambacko and Dieufera Sana. The screenplay was written by Fariala, Tommy Baron and Boris Lojkine. Adrien Lallau handled the cinematography, with editing by César Simonot.

The autobiographical film – Fariala is the son of Congolese parents, based in the CAR and a self-taught musician – previously made the 2022 documentary We, Students!, in which he turned the camera on himself and his friends to capture everyday student life at Bangui University. Congo Boy is a production of Mahongo Films in the CAR, co-produced by Kiripifilms in the DRC, which is the company of filmmaker Dieudo Hamadi (Kinshasa Makambo, Downstream to Kinshasa), and France’s Unité.

You may wonder just how autobiographical the movie is. “It is really my own story, told through Robert, played by Bradley,” Fariala told THR via a translator just before the film’s world premiere. “When you see in the film that Robert is shot at, I was actually shot at.” The same is true for Robert’s stay with a colonel and his participation in a talent show, co-organized by UNICEF, among other things.

The filmmaker sees his experience as a refugee as something that reflects the lives of many people around the world and is showcased in the film. “My family fled the Congo because there was war there, and when we got to the Central African Republic, war started there, too,” Fariala explained. “They wanted to be in a country that was more at peace to protect their family. So they were thinking of going to Benin and then on to Europe to have some stability for our future. But unfortunately, they had passports and their refugee card that showed a different country, so they got arrested.”

After We, Students! was censored in the CAR, he had to go into exile in France, again as a refugee. “We often speak about refugees who want to go to Europe, but there are a lot of people who are refugees within different countries of Africa,” as the film shows, said the director. “And I want to convey that refugees are not beggars. They have to leave their home because this world is really crazy because of human destruction. But the young ones still want to fight; they still have hopes and dreams. I am proud to be a refugee.”

How did the director find his cast to tell a very personal story? “We did some street casting,” he recalled, highlighting that he added a French casting director to his Central African Republic crew to find the lead actor. “He’s my double,” emphasized Fariala. “It took months. I started looking into young singers on the music scene, but they lacked charisma. So I went to look for Congolese refugees, and we went to cultural centers in different neighborhoods. At this school at 6 a.m., we auditioned 50 young boys, including Bradley, and he was so different from the others. He was reserved and smiling, but he had something in common with me. He liked to sing and rap, but only in his bedroom, because his father didn’t want to hear anything about art. His father just wanted his son to do well in school, like mine. So I gave him an improv exercise about failing his high school degree, and it was very different from the others.”

Fariala was convinced that the young man was the right person to play the lead role. “But I had to talk to his parents, who didn’t agree at first,” he shared with THR. “So I had to be very persuasive.”

The rest of the cast is also made up of non-professional actors. And many portray their real-life experience, such as soldiers appearing in the film as soldiers, and Fariala’s aunt playing herself. That plays into the filmmaker’s interest in both documentary and fiction, and in mixing the two in his films. “I started out in documentary, but I always like to add a layer of fiction into my documentaries,” he told THR. And Congo Boy is a fictionalized version of his own life, with the reliance on a non-professional cast adding another layer of documentary vibe, he noted.

What’s next for Fariala? “For my next projects, whether they are documentary or fiction, I want to keep doing that,” mixing genres, the filmmaker told THR. “I have another documentary that I started filming before Congo Boy. It’s called To Live and is about one year of my life after We, Students! was released and was censored in the Central African Republic and I had to go into exile in France.”

What awaits audiences? “I was a bit lost in France,” the creative shared. “I was lonely, and I didn’t know how to talk to people, how to interact, and so I felt homesick. And I filmed myself to live. The camera became my friend; it kept me busy. At the same time, my little sister was sending me footage of the family back home, which helped me really hang in there. So, this will be my next film.”

But Fariala has more in the works. “I have written another fiction film which could be a sequel to Congo Boy, because of this character of Robert,” he told THR. “I want to see what happens when he has become a musician and when he becomes famous and how, when he’s accepted in the Central African Republic, he is going to live with success. I want to keep digging into that.”

NBC‘s newest comedy Sunset P.I. is coming to TV in February, and creators Dan Goor and Luke Del Tredici teased what’s ahead while on a panel at the network’s Backlot Press Day in Los Angeles on Monday afternoon. They were joined by series stars Jake Johnson, Keith David, Langston Kerman, and Mary Shalaby,

Sunset P.I. is a half-hour comedy that centers on Mickey (Johnson), who is smart, cynical, and heartbroken, but trying to pretend he’s not. Mickey is a private investigator with a knack for solving cases and a former LAPD cop whose life imploded three years ago.

David plays Mickey’s boss, Garner Taggart, who runs the Garner Taggart PI Agency where his son Mitch (Kerman) and Mickey are the main PIs. Shalaby plays Raya, who also works at the PI Agency. Jane Levy, who was unable to attend the presser, portrays Faye, a smart and resourceful investigative journalist and a force of nature.

The duo, who executive produced the beloved police comedy series Brooklyn Nine-Nine, revealed on the panel that they found inspiration for Sunset P.I. from the hit 80s dramedy series Moonlighting and the critically acclaimed HBO Max medical drama series The Pitt.

Moonlighting centered on the Blue Moon Detective Agency, formed by Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) and David Addison (Bruce Willis). The sexual tension between Maddie and David kept viewers on the edge of their seats weekly.

“Yeah, we were definitely influenced by Moonlighting. Unfortunately, Jane Levy couldn’t be here today, but the chemistry between Jake and Jane is unbelievable,” shared Goor. “It’s hard to watch, but in a good way. I should not have said that,” he continued with a laugh.

“It’s loosely inspired by [Moonlighting]. We really like the chemistry between them and the dating and that, but it’s also a hard comedy and an ensemble workplace in the way that Brooklyn Nine Nine is and Parks and Rec. We’re trying the mashup of all the great network television shows we love,” added Del Tredici.

The Noah Wyle-led The Pitt is centered on the lives of medical workers at a fictional Pittsburgh hospital. However, the inspiration from this show doesn’t come from the storyline.

“We were really inspired by The Pitt, which feels like both a really effective streaming show and also a really effective network show. And we felt like with a PI show, where you can have some overriding plot elements, and also do case-of-the-week things, and do workplace comedy, we are hoping to get the best of both worlds. [Sunset P.I.] is a network show, but we are also conscious of the fact that a large percentage of the audience will stream it,” Goor said.