PICKS: First Asian Pitch winners announced

Last November at the Asian Television Forum, three broadcasters signed an agreement to create a competition seeking projects targeted at an Asian market. Calling the project The Asian Pitch, Japanese broadcaster NHK came together with Singapore-based MediaCorp and Korean public broadcaster KBS to put out the call for original docs telling stories from the region. The call was open to filmmakers with an Asian background, living and working in the area, and lasted from January until April 2007. In that time, over 130 proposals were submitted from Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand and the US. This past July, a representative executive producer from each founding broadcaster listened to pitches from the 15 finalists at the MediaCorp Caldecott Broadcast Centre in Singapore. From the finalists, three were selected and awarded full funding. One of the winners was director Faiza Ahmed Khan's Supermen of Malegaon.