The Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This worldwide organization involving critics, filmmakers, festival organizers and curators, distributors and exhibitors, as well as film educators of 29 member countries was created in New Delhi in 1990 and has its headquarter in Singapore.
The organisation took under its wing the now defunct magazine Cinemaya which provided a forum for mostly Asian critics, writers and scholars to document and evaluate Asian films and subsequently add them to the Asian cinema canon.
NETPAC is best known for the institution of the NETPAC Award for the best Asian film and which is now given at 28 international film festivals in 21 countries and 5 continents.
In 2010, NETPAC turns 20 years and will be celebrating with a serie of programmes. Books on the cinemas of the Philippines, China, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Turkey will be published. Classic articles culled from the pages of Cinemaya will be compiled and published as a book. Special celebratory events and programmes will be organized at international film festivals in Asia and Europe.
An international conference called NETPAC@20: The Culture and Politics of Asian Cinema will be held in New Delhi in August 2010. It will be the focal point of a series of events commemorating 20 years of NETPAC in New Delhi from 18 to 22 August, 2010, and will include screenings of NETPAC award winning films, performances by traditional picture story-tellers from India, and from Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Thailand, plus an exhibition, all under the name “Imaging Asia: The Netpac Festival”.
