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The Busan International Film Festival’s  (BIFF) Asian Network of Documentary (AND) has since its inception aimed to support the production and distribution of Asian documentary films. To this end, it has long been a tentpole of BIFF’s Asian Cinema Fund (ACF), within which it is supporting 17 projects this year. Now AND has begun a collaborative support program with international current affairs television channel Al Jazeera English (AJE), located in Qatar.

 

Tentatively called “Viewfinder: Asia,” this will be AJE’s second installment of their “Viewfinder” series. The 2011 edition, “Viewfinder: Latin America,” was a collaboration with Uruguay’s Doc Montevideo. The new partnership will allow AJE to exploit AND’s vast outreach and networking capabilities across Asia to cull the finest and most fresh documentary filmmakers.

 

The program will initially shortlist 25 filmmakers, from which it will select ten to attend a week-long workshop in Busan beginning just before the 17th BIFF’s opening on October 4th. Through the training workshop, which will further develop the participants’ production skills, AJE will select possible projects to air on its network. After the commissioned filmmakers sign with AJE, they will then start their newly developed projects. By annually exploring different global documentary networks on each continent through the “Viewfinder” series, AJE also hopes to slowly build a cohesive infrastructure that will help match potential co-production partners and documentarians across the globe.

 

In addition to the AJE project, BIFF has also entered a partnership with New York-based video publisher Cinelan, which specializes in the distribution of short-format documentary films and will allow AND to widen its network far beyond Asia. Additionally, this year’s BIFF will see the publication distribution of AND’s five-year report, “Asian Documentary Today.” The report will examine the state of documentary filmmaking in Asia, feature interviews with a variety of Asian documentarians, and dissect currents trends in the field.

 

“Viewfinder: Asia” will be accepting applications until Friday, August 3 at http://www.ajeviewfinder.com