Kemcolians at FiLUMS' 11

After effectively participating in two KAPS short film festivals i thought i had garnered enough experience to take it to the next level !! FiLUMS ! (the LUMS FILM FESTIVAL)

Well frankly speaking 1 year ago i didnt knew much about this FiLUMS mumbo jumbo (nobody did lol), thats coz it wasnt a big festival back then , partially because of no international enteries n largely because of being masked by the immensely huge KARA FILM FESTIVAL of Karachi . Well to their luck IMDB registered them this year as a proper FILM FESTIVAL and KARA FILM FESTIVAL went down the drain (brilliant luck i suppose), thus it exploded n got HUUGGEEE !! To the surprise of the FiLUMS team they recieved 750 enteries out of which 230 were international submissions , WAIT WHAT !!! 230 FOREIGN FILMS !! yeah i was surprised too !

i also jumped into this bandwagon n submitted our two short films (by theknightsproduction) at the eleventh hour n after a week (of crying n shouting of their official facebook page members) they displayed the 130 shortlisted films on thier website ! n to my surprise our both short films "AAG" & "INCOMPLETE" were shortlisted for the event.

There were four different categories for films submitted to FiLUMS '11

Short films

Animated shorts

Feature Lengths

Documentaries

The festival was scheduled to take place from 11th Feb to 13th Feb , and the awards night was also supposed to take place on the very same night (a nice way to ruin the valentines day for the vast majority :p)

After all the acceptance letters n other official gibberish i and omer headed to Lums on 11th. Only the team heads were invited for registration and introduction so our other team members had to lay off for a day.

" DAY 1 " had a slow start !! Registrations took alot of time ! then there was official welcome in which they once again told us how "HUGE" they were this year n how "AWESOME" all of the films were which further added to the stress of the participants present there !

The judges for Short films were some awesomely talented peeps such as MIAN ADNAN (creator of award wining short film HEAL) , Bilal lashari (the guy who directed popular music videos such as SAJNI by JAL) , actors such as TIPU Sharif and Mohib mirza n few other guys !

Though not of my any concern i was hugely disappointed by the judges of feature films namely Syed Noor , Reema khan , Moammar Rana and Javed Shiekh . i spoke against them during the first day of festival because this festival was supposed to revive the pakistani film industry , n how is it possible if the films are being judged by the very same people who killed it !

A journalist published all this in his article

http://tribune.com.pk/story/117711/children-of-taliban-premieres-at-filums/

Nonetheless i met immensely talented kids from all over pak n the screening of documentary Children of Taliban by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy ( an Emmy award winner) made the day better !

"DAY 2" had a great start . Our whole team (me , Omer , Arsalan and Usama) was on time n after a lil bit the event started with the screening of the Films .. One word for all the films i saw ... BRILLIANT !! All the foreign & the local films were amazing , i was just blown away with the quality of films (there goes the dream of being nominated and winning lol)

The workshop on day 2 was conducted by immensely talented Sarmad Khoosat who showed us his own series of short films he made back in time (n believe me they were awesome) .

To our great luck we met the legendary Javed Akhtar n few other artists from our industry such as Sania saeed and others!! b/w the screenings n workshops we roamed in Lums campus with shattered hopes of being nominated in any category lol ! day 2 ended with the screening of award wining short film "HEAL" by "MIAN ADNAN" , it was the best short film i ever saw n believe me thats not an overstatement !!

"DAY 3" had a late start , (mainly because we were in hangover of the awesomeness of day 2 lol) we got a bit late n missed few screenings but were in time to attend the workshop conducted by my TWO BIG FOES "Syed noor" n "Reema khan" . To my surprise Reema had a great personality n she knew what to speak n more importantly when to speak , but syed noor failed to impress me (trust me it wasn't a gender biased decision lol). After that workshop FiLUMS team told that they'll be contacting the shortlisted Nominees on their cell phones within half an hour..(I kept checking my cell phone every 10 secs lol) We infact got busy with friends in cafetria nd after a while (to my surprise) i had 2 missed calls from FiLUMS team . They told me that our short film "INCOMPLETE" was nominated for two award categories : Best SHORT FILM & BEST DIRECTION (with 5 nominations each) , Overjoyed with the news we waited for the awards n dinner night !!

Awards night was a paparazzi flooded event (mainly because of its huge celebrity loaded guestlist) , we met wonderful people like Seemi Raheel , Ahsan khan , Meekal (guy from ufone ads) and some funny people like our beloved "MEERA JI" lol , the women cant utter a word without making u laugh (trust me :p) , she even told the people that here many young budding artists and film makers are present which reminds her of her mother who is a great artist lol , she also mentioned that she wanted to direct films like us people :p.

(we both were nominated for best direction)

Sadly we didnt bagged the first position in both the categories we got nominated!! but yet the whole experience was just efin amazing !! FiLUMS ' 11 was HUGE and the quality of films screened and the workshops n the celebrities judging the films is probably as high as it gets in pakistan , all the amatuer film makers in KEMU should keep n eye over this event for future !!





P.s : Our Youtube channel link to view the short films (http://www.youtube.com/user/TheKnightsProduction)