Filmmaker Kentaro Hagiwara has won the 2013 Sundance/NHK International Filmmaker Award, for his upcoming film "Spectacled Tiger."
The award was presented in a private ceremony during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, and announced Saturday.
Hagiwara is an alum of the first Screenwriters Workshop in Tokyo, a collaboration between the Sundance Institute and NHK, the Japanese broadcaster. Hagiwara is a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, and has a short film, "Super Star," on his resume.
"Spectacled Tiger," co-written by Kyohta Fujimoto, will be Hagiwara's first feature film. It's a romantic coming-of-age story about a high school trivia whiz whose black-and-white, wrong-or-right worldview is challenged when he develops a crush on a new girl, Misaki.
In past years, the Sundance/NHK award has gone to such films as Benh Zeitlin's Oscar-nominated "Beasts of the Southern Wild," and this year's Sundance competition film "May in the Summer," written and directed by Cherien Dabis.
Sean P. Means