Story on reindeer herders wins eco film fest award
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian film producer Sean Lin’s film Sleepless, which features the impact of climate change on the lives of indigenous nomadic reindeer herders in Mongolia, won the Best Short Film Award at the 12th Kuala Lumpur International Eco Film Festival (KLEFF) Awards.
The 12-minute-plus film is about a miner who takes his daughter, who fell ill as a result of a polluted environment, to be treated by a shaman in the forest.
They end up living among the Tsaantan tribe nomadic reindeer herders who are under threat from climate change.
“We were inspired to do the film when we discovered that Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar was the most polluted capital in the world.
“The two directors and I looked into the issue and we found that the nomadic tribe was paying the price of climate change,” he said after receiving the award from Energy, Science, Technology, Environment and Climate Change Minister Yeo Bee Yin yesterday at the KLEFF ceremony yesterday.
The ceremony was held in conjunction with the 10th International Greentech & Eco Products Exhibition & Conference Malaysia.
Lin, who has won more than 40 local and international awards, said he was passionate about creating environmental awareness.
It took the team of four and several local crew members three weeks to shoot the short film in November last year, travelling along bumpy dirt tracks for days from Ulaanbaatar to the Nalaikh coal mine and Taiga forest.
“We shot in the winter where the temperature dropped to -40ºC. On the coldest days, we could be out in the open for only 15 minutes at any one time and then we had to go back into the tent,” he said.
Lin said they chose to shoot during winter because pollution is worst during that time of the year.
Lin received a trophy, certificate and Kiehl’s products.
The award celebrates the work of filmmakers and cinematographers who advocate environmental sustainability and climate action, said Ecoknights president Dr Yasmin Rashid.
This year, KLEFF received a total of 233 submissions from 48 countries.
Out of these were 86 groundbreaking films of various genres and lengths, which were screened throughout the festival.
The other winning films were
Beyond Climate by Ian Mauro (Canada) who won the Best Feature Film category, Education on the Boat - a new hope for tomorrow by Km Taj-Biul Hasan (Bangladesh) who won the Best Short Documentary category and Barely Alive by Chan Ming Chun (Hong Kong) who won the Best Animation category.
Carbon Building Blocks of Life by SCM Asia (Malaysia) won the Best Public Service Announcement category and Cloud Kingdom by Nady Afiqah (Singapore) won the Asean Young Filmmaker category.