Asia scoops top honors at San Sebastian fest
SAN FRANCISCO: Vanishing message service Snapchat announced Saturday it will launch a line of video-catching sunglasses, a spin on Glass eyewear abandoned by Google more than a year ago. The California-based company, which also announced it is changing its name to Snap Inc., said in an online post that its Spectacles will be “available soon,” with media reports pegging the price at $130 a pair. “We’ve been working for the past few years to develop a totally new type of camera,” said the post by Team Snap. “Spectacles are sunglasses with an integrated video camera that makes it easy to create Memories.” Snap earlier this year added a way to save images as “Memories,” a shift for a service know for messages that disappear after being viewed. Spectacles were billed as having one of the smallest wireless cameras in the world, capable of capturing a day’s worth of “Snaps” on a single charge. The sunglasses connect to Snap software wirelessly using Bluetooth or wifi connections. Spectacles cameras take video from the perspective of wearers, boast a 115-degree field of view, and capture snippets of video intended for sharing at the service. SAN SEBASTIAN: Asian cinema dominated awards at the San Sebastian film festival, with veteran Chinese director Feng Xiaogang’s “I am not Madame Bovary” taking the top Golden Shell prize while Fan Bingbing won the best actress gong for her role in the same film.
In the satirical comedy, Chinese star Fan plays a cafe owner caught in the bureaucratic maze of the Chinese legal system after she is swindled by her ex-husband.
It had attracted attention earlier this month at the Toronto film festival where it won the International Federation of Film Critics’ prize, with the jury hailing “its ambitious rendering of a woman’s Kafkaesque struggle as she takes on the Chinese legal system.”
Among the other awards Saturday, prolific South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-Soo won ‘best director’ for his comedy “Yourself and Yours” about the adventures of a painter seeking to win back his girlfriend, a woman who while drinking tends to forget her flirtations.