LOS ANGELES, Oct. 18 (Xinhua) -- Chinese student filmmakers were among rising stars Thursday night at the 46th Student Academy Awards ceremony held at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, California, taking home one gold medal and one silver medal.
The Academy honored 16 Student Academy Award winners at the ceremony. The Student Academy Awards is an international student film competition conducted by the Academy and the Academy Foundation.
Chinese student filmmaker Sun Yifan took the gold prize in the international documentary category for her film "Family" which follows a Chinese girl, Lola, who was adopted into a Belgian family 12 years earlier as an infant. Her dream of reuniting with her birth family finally came true when Lola's two families met for the first time last year.
Sun was born in Hohhot in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in 1988 and received a Bachelor's degree in film studies at Beijing Film Academy in 2009.
Because of her admiration for film director Krzysztof Kieslowski, Sun attended the Lodz Film School in Poland.
She described her documentary as a cultural and emotional flow between Easterners and Westerners.
"The love for Lola links two families in two faraway continents, forming a happy big family," she told Xinhua.
"I'm so happy to win a gold medal at Student Oscars as a Chinese student filmmaker. I even can't believe it's true when I got the call from the Academy to invite me to this ceremony," she added.
Another film, "The Chef," directed by Chinese student filmmaker Hao Zheng from the American Film Institute won silver medal in the domestic narrative category. The film follows an old Chinese chef who teaches a robot to cook, which places him in a dilemma between artificial intelligence and human race.
"The award is not only for me, but also for more and more Chinese students who come to the United States to study film art," said the young director, noting that he hopes to show Chinese culture to the western world through his films.
The producer and co-writer of "The Chef" Deng Yixian said the story is a deep thinking of the historical pattern of human development and their future.
Another co-writer of the film Kong Leqi contributed the success of the film to team work, noting that all the masterminds and main framers are from China and other Asian countries.
The Student Academy Awards were established in 1972 to support and encourage excellence in filmmaking at the collegiate level. Past Student Academy Award winners have gone on to receive 62 Oscar nominations and have won or shared 12 awards.
This year, the Student Academy Awards competition received a total of 1,615 entries from 255 U.S. colleges and universities and 105 from international schools. The filmmakers' works are judged in seven categories -- four domestic school categories (animation, documentary, narrative and alternative) and three international school categories.
