‘Delhi Crime’ wins big at Asian Academy Creative Awards

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Film spotlights women medics taking lead in Syria’s bunker hospitals

LOS ANGELES, Dec 7, (RTRS): Richie Mehta’s harrowing Netflix series “Delhi Crime” was the big winner at the 2nd annual Asian Academy Creative Awards in Singapore on Friday. Representing the show, lead actress Shefali Shah was rushed off her feet as she repeatedly had to return to the stage. “Delhi Crime” earned her best actress in a leading role, best drama series and best direction, and fiction, for Mehta. Earlier, the series also won best original program by a streamer/OTT on the first night of the two-day awards.

Shah was also on stage, at Singapore’s beautifully restored historical Victoria theatre to present the inaugural award for best feature film, that went to her compatriot Zoya Akhtar’s Indian Oscar submission “Gully Boy”. Indian animated show, “Lamput”, produced for Cartoon Network was also among the winners.

Indonesian Oka Antara won best actor in a leading role for Hooq’s “Brata”, while Jamie Aditya won best supporting actor for Indonesia-set HBO Asia show “Grisse”. The loudest cheers of the evening were reserved for 10-year-old Pyae Pyae who won best supporting actress in Myanmar’s “The Only Mom”. The theatre went ‘aaww’ as the child sobbed her way through her acceptance speech, but recovered sufficiently enough to declare, “I will try to be the best actress in my future.”

The evening got off to a rousing start when Loren Allred, the original singer of “Never Enough” from the hit musical “The Greatest Showman”, provided a full-throated rendition of the number, fresh off her flight from New York. The standup routine from Malaysian comedian Kevin Jay also proved extremely popular with the capacity audience.

During the five-year siege of Syria’s eastern Ghouta region, doctor Amani Ballour worked in a fortified underground hospital called The Cave where she and her team defied constant bombardments to save thousands of lives.

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Her story has now been made into a film, which Syrian director Feras Fayyad hopes will help change attitudes towards women in the patriarchal society. “The Cave”, to be screened in Britain from Friday, follows Ballour as she deals with everything from babies choking on building debris following Russian warplane strikes to the terrifying aftermath of a chemical weapons attack.

The team battle with rudimentary equipment, power cuts and dwindling medical supplies while tending to a stream of patients, including many traumatised and malnourished children. But Ballour, who became the hospital’s manager in 2016, and other female staff also have to confront discrimination.

At one point a patient’s husband demands to talk to a male manager “who can do a better job”, telling Ballour that women should stay at home. “No one can tell me what to do, or where to work,” replies Ballour, a specialist in paediatrics.

Fayyad, who won an Oscar nomination for his 2017 film “Last Men in Aleppo”, praised Ballour for challenging stereotypes in a society where girls often marry as teenagers. The doctor, whose sister wed at 13, encourages the young girls she treats to dream big and do “important” work when they grow up.

Fayyad said the bunker hospitals gave women medical workers a place where they could claim a freedom and authority often denied them above ground. The director, who was arrested and tortured following the 2011 uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, said he believed women’s roles were changing.

“I have seen while filming in Syria how women’s voices are growing, and I wanted to reflect that,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Fayyad’s team recorded about 1,000 hours of footage in The Cave and six other hospitals. Much of it was so harrowing that a therapist was brought in to counsel the post-production team.

The director said he was ready to share the footage with anyone pursuing justice for victims of the war. UN investigators have accused Syrian forces and their allies of committing war crimes in eastern Ghouta through bombardments and deliberate starvation.

Damascus denies ever having used chemical weapons during the Syrian war, now in its ninth year, but UN experts say there is evidence of multiple attacks. The Cave closed after the Syrian army recaptured eastern Ghouta in April 2018.

Now a refugee in Turkey, Ballour said in a statement that she hoped “The Cave” would show Syrian women that they were strong. “I tried to say to all the women that I saw … ‘Just believe in yourself’. One day, things will change. Society will change,” she said.

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