Matti’s BuyBust goes to Macao fest

MANILA, Philippines — The Erik Matti film BuyBust will have a red-carpet screening today at the ongoing International Film Festival and Awards Macao (IFFAM).

The action-thriller, which foregrounds the government’s drug war and stars Anne Curtis as a drug enforcement agent who gets caught up in an operation-gone-haywire, is the only Filipino movie featured at the third edition of IFFAM which runs until Dec. 14.

It is screened under the out-of-competition section Flying Daggers, which spotlights the “best in the current international genre filmmaking,” organizers said in a media release.

Matti who has also helped curate the filmfest’s Director’s Choice (Retrospective) — “a non-competitive selection of six classic genre films selected by six well-known directors” — confirmed he will grace the event at the Macau Tower at 2:45 p.m. to be followed by a public screening at 3 p.m.

Also expected to attend the filmfest are BuyBust producer Dondon Monteverde and lead cast Brandon Vera.

Aside from BuyBust, the five other films programmed in the Flying Daggers section include Italian-Canadian director Panos Cosmatos’ revenge film Mandy starring IFFAM talent ambassador Nicolas Cage, who will also hold a Masterclass today for industry insiders and aspiring actors.

Matti is also one of the three Asian filmmakers alongside Hong Kong director Mabel Cheung and Indonesian director Edwin, who were tasked to select influential films from non-Asian cinema and introduce their chosen films to the Macao audience for the Director’s Choice (Retrospective) section. The director picked the 1984 crime drama Once Upon A Time in America, which starred Robert De Niro and directed by Sergio Leone.

The action-thriller, which is directed by Erik Matti and topbilled by Anne Curtis, will have a red-carpet gala screening today at the ongoing International Film Festival and Awards Macao (IFFAM).

The rest of the full IFFAM program includes the international competition showcasing 12 films made by first- and second-time filmmakers with $60,000 as the award-winning prize. Gala presents six mainstream crowd-pleasing films. New Chinese Cinema is a competitive section of outstanding films from Chinese-speaking territories. The Best of Fest Panorama is a non-competitive selection of films from other major international film festivals of the year. For All The Family are films that appeal to a wider demographic of audience. Special Presentations, meanwhile, will screen films at the discretion of the artistic director Mike Goodridge and jury head, the Farewell My Concubine director Chen Kaige.

Lastly, In Focus (Retrospective) celebrates outstanding talents in cinema. For this year, organizers chose Chinese actress-philanthropist Yao Chen, whose humanitarian work had the press calling her as “China’s Angelina Jolie.” She will speak about her career and advocacies in a special In Conversation event. Three of her best films will also be screened.

Adding star power to the filmfest are the two other IFFAM talent ambassadors, Hong Kong star Aaron Kwok and Korean pop star/actress Yoona. 

“I am very pleased with the IFFAM program this year. The whole programming team has worked tirelessly to find the right films for our unique audience in Macao and we are confident that we can build on the enthusiastic audiences we attracted last year. We feel that we have mixed a heady cocktail of bold brand-new cinema, the best of the year’s festival titles, gorgeous classics and big-ticket crowd pleasers, not to mention 11 stunning films in our international competition. I can’t wait for our audiences and juries to see the films,” Goodridge said in a statement.

A relative newbie in the film fest circuit, IFFAM is being aligned with Macao’s draw as not just a gaming capital but also a “growing cultural destination, building an audience for diverse world cinema by programming films both critically acclaimed and commercially successful.”