Pushpendra Misra's Valley Song was presented with the Hubert Bals award for most promising feature film project at the Film Bazaar in Goa on Friday night.

The award came with a cash prize of $6,400 (Euros5,000) towards the project's development. Produced by Misra and Alakananda Nag, the project is a Hindi adaptation of South African playwright Athol Fugard's play of the same name and follows the relationship between a grandfather who is afraid of change and his granddaughter who dreams of becoming a singer in Bombay.

The Rotterdam filmfestival's Bianca Taal and Marit Van Den Elshout said the project told a 'simple and universal story yet approached it in a daring and unconventional way, which excited us both.'

Meanwhile, Travels Of My T-shirt picked up the $4,000 (Rs200,000) award for most promising non-feature award from the Entertainment Society of Goa. To be directed by Ranjan Kamath, with Tom Cherian as producer, the project is a story about globalisation that follows the people, politics and markets that go into creating a simple cotton T-shirt.

The second edition of Film Bazaar attracted more than 350 delegates, including around 90 overseas visitors for four days of meetings, seminars, work-shops and master classes at the Goa Marriott Resort. A total of 15 feature and ten documentary projects were presented over the four days, along with five South Asian-themed projects from the European Producers Club.

The programme also included a Work-In-Progress Lab and a Screenwriters' Lab held in association with Amsterdam-based Binger Filmlab.

At today's seminar on Taking Indian Documentaries to Global Audiences, speakers including Greenlight Media's Sophokles Tasioulis (Earth, Deep Blue), Mike Pandey (The Last Migration) and Fortissimo Films' Nelleke Driessen discussed methods of reviving India's documentary sector which occasionally wins awards but is under-funded and disorganised.

Pandey said part of problem is that local filmmakers are rooted in a culture of relying on government agencies and public broadcaster Doordarshan for backing - which has resulted in too many pedantic films about social issues: 'We need to reinvent ourselves - the whole world is moving ahead so we had better change our style of story-telling.'

Director Ashim Ahluwalia spoke of his experiences with documentary John And Jane - which an Indian film festival rejected but was selected by the Toronto International Film Festival and acquired by HBO for theatrical release.

The market wraps tomorrow (Nov 29) with final project meetings. Meanwhile, the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) wraps on Tuesday, Dec 2, with an awards ceremony and screening of Majid Majidi's Song Of Sparrows.

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