Pinoy filmmaker is 2013 Unesco laureate

MANILA, Philippines - Filmmaker, Palanca awardee and fine arts professor Richard Soriano Legaspi was selected as one of the UNESCO-Aschberg Laureate Artists of 2013.

The UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries Program offers residencies to young artists worldwide to advocate and promote creativity, highlight cultural exchange and the need for artists to enrich their experience through contact with other cultures. These residencies are catalysts for the development of artistic expression in all cultures of the world.

Legaspi is currently on his four-month residency at the UNIDEE (University of Ideas) Cittadellarte–Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella in the northern Italian region of Piemonte until October. Every year, 14 to 16 artists from Italy and overseas are chosen and invited to live in Cittadellarte. The invited artists will explore the relationship between art and society and examine methodologies of creative interventions to activate important projects for a socially responsible change in society.

At the end of the four months in Biella there will be a public presentation entitled UNIDEE in Progress, displaying the development of the projects and the result of the researches. The residents will have the chance to work collectively for the preparation and immediate realization of an experimental event and share their conceptual and operational capacity.

The scholarship is co-financed by UNESCO-Aschberg and the Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto and founded by Michelangelo Pistoletto in 1999. The artistic disciplines for which the bursaries are awarded are Creative Writing, Music and Visual Arts. These three fields cover artistic specializations that drive the creative industries, in particular the recording industries, the organization of concerts, the audiovisual sector, graphic design and publishing.

Legaspi is a graduate of Fine Arts, major in advertising, of the University of the East Caloocan, where he also teaches. He is a fellow of the Asian Film Academy in Busan, South Korea, where he studied filmmaking.

His first full-length film “Paano Ko Sasabihin?” starring Enchong Dee and Erich Gonzales won the Special Jury Prize, Audience Award and Best in Editing at the 2009 Cinema One Originals and was a finalist at the Babel Film Festival in Italy. Legaspi is currently in post-production of his NCCA-funded film “Si Pipo at ang Pusang si Kamuning” and is writing a new script entitled “Aliping Lupa.”