<\/p>\n
\u201cA Sad and Beautiful World,\u201d \u201cLeft-Handed Girl,\u201d Vishal Jethwa and Tandin Bidha were among the competition winners at the 11th Asian World Film Festival. The winners were announced at the festival\u2019s closing night ceremony on Nov. 20 in Culver City.<\/p>\n
The Lebanese feature \u201cA Sad and Beautiful World\u201d took home the festival\u2019s top prize: the Snow Leopard for best film. Directed by Cyril Aris, the film follows a pair of childhood sweethearts who reunite as adults against the backdrop of political turmoil in Beirut.<\/p>\n
More from Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cLeft-Handed Girl\u201d won the Snow Leopard Audience Award. A Taiwanese feature from director Shih-Ching Tsou, the movie centers around a single mother and her two daughters who open up a night market stall in Taipei. The film is co-written, produced and edited by Academy Award winner Sean Baker, will be released on Netflix Nov. 28.<\/p>\n Jethwa took home the Snow Leopard for best actor for his performance in the Indian feature \u201cHomebound\u201d while Tandin Bidha won the Snow Leopard for best actress for her role in the Bhutan feature \u201cI, the Song.\u201d<\/p>\n The festival spanned 10 days in Culver City, showcasing 46 features and 27 shorts from over 30 Asian countries. Chinese filmmaker Binying served as the festival\u2019s feature film jury president and South Korean filmmaker-actress Jiseung Cho served as the short film jury president.<\/p>\n AWFF executive director Georges N. Chamchoum states, \u201cIn this, our 11th year, we had the good fortune of showing works of unusual strength, clarity and craft. We redoubled our focus on filmmaking and the Asian film experience and were rewarded with a festival that underlined Asia\u2019s exceptional contribution to world cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n See the full list of this year\u2019s AWFF winners below:<\/p>\n Snow Leopard for Best Film<\/strong> \u2013 \u201cA Sad and Beautiful World\u201d (Lebanon), Cyril Aris, director<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Snow Leopard for Best<\/strong> Actor<\/strong> \u2013 Vishal Jethwa, \u201cHomebound\u201d (India)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Snow Leopard for Best<\/strong> Actress<\/strong> \u2013 Tandin Bidha, \u201cI, the Song\u201d (Bhutan)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Snow Leopard Special Jury Award<\/strong> \u2013 \u201cPalestine 36\u201d (Palestine), Annemarie Jacir, director<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Snow Leopard Jury Discretionary Award<\/strong> for Best Director<\/strong> \u2013 Anselm Chan, \u201cThe Last Dance\u201d (Hong Kong)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Snow Leopard Audience Award<\/strong> \u2013 \u201cLeft-Handed Girl\u201d (Taiwan), Shih-Ching Tsou, director<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Asian Vision Award \u2013<\/strong> \u201cThe Summer Will End\u201d (Russia\/Yakutia), Maksim Arbugaev and Vladimir Munkuev<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Best Short Film<\/strong> \u2013 \u201cDon\u2019t Be Late, Myra\u201d (Pakistan), Afia Serena Nathaniel, director<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Short Film First Runner-up<\/strong> \u2013 \u201cSheep\u201d (Iran), Hadi Babaeifar, director<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Short Film Second Runner-up<\/strong> \u2013 \u201cBefore the Winter\u201d (U.S.\/China), Juan Zuloaga Eslait, director<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Short Film Special Mention<\/strong> \u2013 \u201cZahra\u201d (Jordan), Hadi Shatat, director<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Snow Leopard Lifetime Achievement Award<\/strong> \u2013 Daniel Lee (Yan-Kong Lee), action and martial arts writer-director<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Snow Leopard for Outstanding Cinematic Achievement (Male) <\/strong>\u2013 Lee Byung Hun, actor and singer<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Snow Leopard for Outstanding Cinematic Achievement (Female) <\/strong>\u2013 Lucy Liu, <\/strong>American actress<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Snow Leopard Rising Star <\/strong>\u2013 Nina Ye, Taiwanese actress<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n Bruce Lee Award <\/strong>\u2013 Michael Jai White, American actor-martial artist<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n Best of Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source nz.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cA Sad and Beautiful World,\u201d \u201cLeft-Handed Girl,\u201d Vishal Jethwa and Tandin Bidha were among the competition winners at the 11th Asian World Film Festival. The winners were announced at the festival\u2019s closing night ceremony on Nov. 20 in Culver City. The Lebanese feature \u201cA Sad and Beautiful World\u201d took home the festival\u2019s top prize: the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2171268,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[417226,417224,417227,417225,376553],"class_list":["post-2171267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-asian-world-film-festival","tag-snow-leopard","tag-taiwanese-feature","tag-tandin-bidha","tag-vishal-jethwa"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/\u2018A-Sad-and-Beautiful-World-\u2018Left-Handed-Girl-Vishal-Jethwa-and.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2171267"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2171269,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171267\/revisions\/2171269"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2171268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2171267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2171267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2171267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n