Feature Film Award

The Satyajit Ray Foundation is delighted to announce Andrea Segre's debut feature 'Li AND THE POET', premiered in the UK at the 55th BFI London Film Festival, as the winner of the 16th Annual Satyajit Ray Award.

The jury cited the film as "a beautiful, multi-layered, deeply textured film about immigration, old age, cross-cultures, and the fragility of love: a very mature first feature, superbly shot in Venice, directed by Andrea Segre"

Shun Li is a Chinese woman who has in effect sold herself into slavery in Italy in order to pay for her passage from China and the eventual transport of her son to live with her. Transferred from a textile factory in Rome to work in a bar on Chioggia, an island in the Venetian lagoon, she develops a warm but platonic friendship with Bepi, a retired fisherman (played empathetically by the ubiquitous and impressive Rade Serbedzija). But both her employers and his circle of fisherman friends regard their relationship with sordid suspicion and there are potentially dire consequences for Li. An unusual and compelling first feature deservedly selected for the Director's Fortnight section of the Venice Film Festival, this has a terrific central performance by Zhao Tao as Li, which is both restrained and heartfelt. Li and the Poet takes the essence of an all- too-real-life situation (the relatively recent influx of Chinese immigrants into the environs of Venice) and gives us a vivid contemporary story that is also simultaneously a new filmic look at aspects of Venetian life, refreshingly naturalistic and free of picture postcard tourism.