Singapore – One of the first Asian Pitch winning documentaries – Supermen of Malegaon won the City of Rome award for Best Documentary 2008 at the 9th Asiaticafilmmediale Festival held in Rome on November 23. Asiaticafilmmediale Festival was created with the idea of building a bridge between Italy and the Asian continent. It chooses cinema, a medium sensitive to change, as the best tool for renewing the dialogue between East and West. This edition of the festival once again featured a splendid panorama of recent Asian films and documentaries from countries like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Philippines, Japan, Jordon, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Singapore, Syria, Sri Lanka, and Turkey. All the entries are Italian premiers. The Asian Pitch was created in 2007 by an NHK-MediaCorp-KBS collaboration to find original stories about Asia to present Asian viewpoints, production styles and values to Western markets. It’s about a new wave of story – telling of Asian issues and concerns that will make an impact in Asia and the international market. In 2007, three out of 120 proposals were awarded full funding to produce the documentaries in high-definition. Supermen of Malegaon, produced and directed by Faiza Ahmed Khan, from India was one of the three winners.