Yamin Tun

BIOGRAPHIE

Writer/director Yamin Tun is the New Zealand film industry’s SPADA New Filmmaker of the Year 2016. She won the Madman Entertainment Jury Prize for best short film and the Wallace Filmmaking Achievement Award at the New Zealand International Film Festivals 2016 for her short film WAIT. WAIT also won the New Zealand Film Commission Jury Prize at Show Me Shorts 2016, is the first Mandarin-language New Zealand film ever to feature at NZIFF, and was the featured short on Air New Zealand international flights in 2017. Yamin is currently developing feature film projects as writer-director, including The Teak and the Cloth which was selected for New Zealand’s prestigious screenwriting lab Story Camp 2016, and invited by Sundance and Cannes mentor Gyula Gazdag to apply for the invitation-only Three Rivers Residency, with a panel including Christina Jeune, Artistic Director of the Cannes Film Festival. The Teak and the Cloth is the only project from New Zealand ever invited to apply for this residency. Yamin’s feature screenplay Hong Kong Story was selected for Story Camp 2017. Both Hong Kong Story and The Teak and the Cloth have also twice been shortlisted for Sundance Screenwriters Lab. In December 2017 Yamin was shortlisted for the Sundance Merata Mita Fellowship, and in 2016 Yamin was selected to a mentorship with Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer. In 2013 global completion bond specialists Film Finances Inc selected Yamin to attend Telluride Film Festival – one of only four filmmakers from the world (the others hailing from China, Denmark and South Africa) and the only woman. Yamin is a graduate of the University of Oxford in Philosophy, Politics & Economics. Born in Burma (now Myanmar) of Karen and Burmese mixed indigeneity under a military regime, Yamin and her family escaped and have lived an itinerant life around Europe, Hong Kong and New Zealand. Yamin’s love of film was ignited when she was six years old: up late, she saw the Werner Herzog film Aguirre: The Wrath of God, an experience she found perturbing and irresistible. She was transfixed. Left to her own devices in her new migrant family, she watched late night World and New Wave cinema on Hong Kong television, developing an enduring love of film. As a status-less outsider for most of her life, Yamin had few opportunities to follow her heart in filmmaking, so she took the only escape open to her: academia. Whilst she achieved success, graduating from the University of Oxford by the age of 20 with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics – Yamin always felt something was missing. Since coming to New Zealand, Yamin won a full-fees scholarship prize in the NZ-wide 48hour film competition, allowing her to study one-year graduate directing at Unitec’s film programme. Yamin’s award-winning short film WAIT was written in her year as a student. Yamin’s feature projects include The Teak and the Cloth (a war drama set in the context of the Karen-Burma conflict and the fight for freedom from military rule in Myanmar), Hong Kong Story (about a refugee family facing turmoil in Hong Kong before 1997), The Thirty Seven Klar (a chase across the vibrant festivals of Myanmar to retrieve a young man’s life-spirits - based on Karen spiritual beliefs), The Dream of the River (about the death and reincarnation of a female Shaman through time, based upon Yamin’s grandparent) and Blood and Gold, the feature version of the short written by Jodie Hillock, set in 1870s gold-mining era New Zealand. Yamin is passionate about all her experiences, loving the creative intensity of narrative drama, storytelling from unique cultural and international perspectives and the constant learning of filmmaking. After years of moving in unpaid circles, living hand to mouth as an outsider and being part of many countries and cultures, Yamin has stories to tell and the passion, strength and spirit to tell them. She has seen and felt much, including statelessness, sacrifice and the break-up of her own family, but the most moving thing of all is that wherever she has been, she has experienced the magic beauty of the world.

FILMOGRAPHIE