Professor Raju on the jury panel of the 49th IFFR

Professor Zakir Hossain Raju, Head of the Department of Media and Communication at IUB, is invited for the second time to join the 49th International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), being held between January 22 and February 2, as Jury President for Asian Cinema award. He served as jury president for Asian Cinema award in the 44th edition of IFFR in 2015.

Prof Raju will leave Dhaka on January 25 to join the film festival. He will preside over the Jury board formed by the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) alongside two world-renowned film producers, Arleen Cuevas and Dan Koh.

A board member of NETPAC, Prof Raju is a pioneer for study of Asian cinema since the last three decades. His book, Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity, published in London under Routledge in 2015, marked the emergence of Bangladeshi cinema into global film studies. He also developed a semester-long course on Korean Cinema at IUB, only one of its kind in South Asia, which is underway for the past five years now. In his long career, he has also served as a Jury member in major international film festivals held in France, USA, Australia and South Korea. Former President of Bangladesh Short Film Forum, Raju scripted and directed ten short and documentary films during the 1990s which were featured in international film festivals in USA, Germany, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, Romania, Japan and Malaysia. His film, Beyond the Borders won a Jury Commendation award in European Anthropological Film Festival in 1997.