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Maria by the Sea

Tawfiq Nizamidin

Release year: 2019

Run time: 38 mins

Film type: Fiction

Synopsis

In a restaurant in Seoul, Professor Jung is explaining to his date, Enju Lee, the reason why he was late. While buying her a gift, he ran into his former student, Maria. A fascinating study of human interaction plays out as their date progresses on screen.

 

Director biography

Tawfiq was born in 1991 in Urumchi and received a masters degree in Fiction Film Directing from the Beijing Film Academy. Now he is continuing his career based in Versaille.

In 2017, his first short film The Night of Arzu was selected as one of the five nominees for best short film at the Golden Horse Award Festival in Taipei, and received the award for the best short film at the Chinese Independent Film Festival.

In 2018, he finished his second short film Maria by the Sea , shot in Korea in collaboration with the Korean Academy of Film Arts, which premiered in the “Voices Short” programme of the Rotterdam Film Festival. And in the same year, this short film has selected for the Busan International Film Festival programme “Community”. He was also selected to attend the Fantastic Film School at the Bucheon Film Festival. He is currently completing the script for his first feature film, Faruk and Abdullah .

Director's statement

In this story, the Uyghurs are no longer in the same time and space as the Han Chinese, and the Uyghur girl, Maria, has gone on to make connections with another East Asian race. The problems of the different races are different, and the concerns of Korean society seem really irrelevant in the face of the problems faced by the Uyghurs. They are still too rarefied. Professor Jung, who teaches anthropology, encounters these two problems in one day, and has to ask the two women to meet each other and tell each other their feelings, while he himself looks at the sea and the beach for a while. The three walk away and the story ends, but the audience notices that the name Maria has just written on the beach is instantly washed away by the sea.

Awards:

  • 2018 “Voices Short” programme of the Rotterdam Film Festival
  • 2019 “Community” programme of Busan International Film Festival