Esteemed Platform, FIPRESCI, and NETPAC juries return to TIFF 2022
TORONTO – WEBWIRE – Friday, August 19, 2022
The Toronto International Film Festival® is delighted to welcome the return of three distinguished international film juries to honour outstanding works in this years lineup. The juries, featuring renowned film critics and filmmakers, are composed of five members for FIPRESCI, the International Federation of Film Critics; three jurors for NETPAC, the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema; and three filmmakers for Platform jury.
Its a privilege to have international juries back in person screening films in the cinemas with TIFF audiences, said Anita Lee, Chief Programming Officer, TIFF. It truly feels like the festival is back! The passion, experience and knowledge that they bring to this years Festival will be exciting to watch this September.
The Platform Prize is awarded to the Best film in the Platform programme, which went to Yuni in 2021. The FIPRESCI Jury will award the Prize of International Critics dedicated to emerging filmmakers for the 29th year to one film from the Discovery programme. Last years winner was Anatolian Leopard. The NETPAC Jury will present the NETPAC Award for Best Feature Film from the Contemporary World Cinema and Discovery programmes by an emerging Asian and/or Pacific Islander filmmaker, which went to Costa Brava, Lebanon in 2021.
PLATFORM JURY
Patricia Rozema (Jury Chair) is a writer, producer, and director. Rozema established herself with her internationally celebrated first feature, Ive Heard the Mermaids Singing, which debuted at the Directors Fortnight in Cannes. There, it won the Prix de la Jeunesse, the first of many recognitions including being voted one of Canadas Top 10 Films. Other highlights: writing and directing the love story When Night is Falling, Jane Austens Mansfield Park, and co-writing HBOs Grey Gardens starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange (PEN Screenwriters Award, an Emmy nomination, and a Golden Globe nomination). Rozema is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Iram Haq is a Norwegian Pakistani filmmaker. Haq began writing and directing in 2004. Her first short film Trofast premiered at the 2004 Venice Film Festival. In 2009, she wrote and directed Skylappjenta, later selected for the Sundance Film Festival. Her feature debut I Am Yours premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013, and her second feature What Will People Say was presented in our Platform Programme in 2017.
Chaitanya Tamhane is an independent filmmaker based in Mumbai. Tamhanes debut feature film Court premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2014, where it was awarded the Best Film – Orizzonti and the Lion of the Future award. In 2016, he was selected to be mentored by Alfonso Cuarón as part of the Rolex Mentor-Protégé Arts Initiative. His second film, The Disciple, had its World Premiere in 2020 at the Venice Film Festival in competition, where it was awarded the Golden Osella for Best Screenplay and the FIPRESCI award. The film was released as a Netflix Original and was globally acclaimed as one of the best films of the year.
FIPRESCI JURY
Andrea Crozzoli (Italy) is a film critic, writer, director of Cinemazero, editor of CinemazeroNotizie, and co-founder of Le giornate del cinema muto.
Márcio Sallem (Brazil) is a film critic, teacher, and writer.
Max Borg (Switzerland) is a film critic, writer, and translator for the Locarno Film Festival and the Berlinale.
Andrew Kendall (Guyana) is the Head of the Department of Language and Cultural Studies at the University of Guyana.
Marriska Fernandes (Canada) is Toronto-based entertainment reporter, film critic, and writer for The Toronto Star, Complex, Sharp, Exclaim!, Yahoo, and Elle Canada.
NETPAC JURY
Dr. Ida Yoshinaga, Jury Chair (USA/Hawaiʻi) is an Assistant Professor of science-fiction film at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Diana Ashimova (Kazakhstan) is a producer at A Team Productions and the Artistic Director at the Bastau International Film Festival.
Additional juror to be announced in September.
The FIPRESCI, NETPAC, and Platform Awards will be announced Saturday, September 17 at the 2022 TIFF Awards breakfast at TIFF Bell Lightbox. Details to follow in September.
People actively look for assets classes to invest in for several reasons. For starters, financial instruments like stocks, forex, cryptocurrency, and indices are renowned for generating excellent returns on investment. In some cases, financial instruments are also an excellent way to bet against economic downturns, as is the case with gold and silver. Many people buy gold because it has an inverse relationship with the US dollar and economic cycles. Typically, gold prices rise when economic output declines. This inverse relationship makes gold an ideal investment for those looking to hedge their bets. In addition, those with disposable income don’t want to see inflation eroding their money’s value. As a result, they invest in profitable financial instruments to counteract inflationary effects and circumvent them. Traders and investors have been buying and selling financial instruments for decades. However, the rise of CFD trading is proving to be a game-changer. CFD trading allows traders and investors to speculate and bet on an asset’s price movements without owning it. In addition, it also opens doors for newer investors and traders who want to speculate on an asset’s price changes but have limited capital. That’s because CFD trading allows for leverage. It’s not uncommon for brokers to offer 1:100 leverage for CFD trading, enabling traders to make larger trades than their capital normally allows. Generally, most traders and investors have to find different brokers for different financial instruments. For example, a broker might allow traders to buy and sell stocks and indices. However, if traders want to trade foreign currencies, they’ll need to find another trading platform that supports that. That’s where Crystal Ball Markets comes into the picture, differentiating itself from other trading platforms. Crystal Ball Markets Mobius Trader 7 is a state-of-the-art, cutting-edge platform that lets traders trade multiple assets through a single platform. Traders can use it to trade currencies, agricultural commodities, metals, energy commodities, stocks, indices, cryptocurrencies, and options. The platform also boasts advanced tools and features that appeal to investors. Some salient features of Crystal Ball Markets trading platform include technical analysis tools for comprehensive price analysis, support for algorithmic trading applications, and social trading. A company spokesperson shared, “Crystal Ball Markets aims to make trading easier than ever. CFD trading is growing exponentially, and for a good reason. It opens the doors for traders who want to speculate on an asset’s price without owning it. Crystal Ball Markets trading platform offers traders and investors a plethora of financial instruments for trading. You can trade CFDs of energy commodities, agricultural commodities, cryptocurrencies, forex, and anything else you can name. More importantly, the good news is you don’t need to use different platforms to do so. You can save on broker and trading fees by using our platform to trade CFDs for all your preferred financial instruments.” Crystal Ball Markets also offers numerous resources to newcomers looking to learn more about trading the financial markets. From learning how to make their first trade, traders are given unlimited access to a demo account, in which they can practice their trading strategies till they are ready to go live. About Crystal Ball Markets Contact Crystal Ball MarketsCrystal Ball Markets’ New Mobius Trader 7 Platform Makes It Easier for Traders to Trade CFDS of Multiple Asset Classes Through a Single Platform
Crystal Ball Markets provides an online platform for traders to trade Currencies, Metals, Energy, Stocks/ Shares, Indices, Cryptocurrencies, and Options. Traders do not have to worry about freeze levels, routing rules or other manipulation tactics deployed by unethical brokers. Instead, they provide traders with the best trading conditions to succeed.
Website: www.crystalballmarkets.com
Email: support@crystalballmarkets.com
Address: Suite 305, Griffith Corporate Centre, P.O. Box 1510, Beachmont, Kingstown, St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Phone: +44 1244 94 1257
Crystal Ball Markets
Sasaenia Omilabu
+44 1244 94 1257
https://crystalballmarkets.com/
Contact
Categories
- Blockchain
- Business
- Cryptocurrency
- Finance
- Investment
Geo-location NFT Platform, Area, Brings the Metaverse to the Real World
Set to release a white paper addressing how web3 will connect the digital world to real world products and services.
March 10, 2022 – PRLog — Area, a decentralized platform for digital assets, products and services tied to real-world locations, is releasing a white paper to address how web3 can bridge the gap between the real world and virtual worlds.
Area has recently commenced the sale of geo-location NFTs covering the entire surface of the earth. These NFTs are collectibles representing an area of the world and building blocks of an entire ecosystem of geolocation applications. The sale represents the first step to building what Area calls the “Metasurface”
Area was started by Marcos Siqueira and Paul Niel, two former executives at Goldman Sachs who left the world of finance to pursue purpose-driven endeavors. Marcos became a serial entrepreneur and Paul a professional explorer. They are joined by Elia Locardi, one of the world’s most recognizable travel photographers and Wiliam Entriken, the lead author of the ERC-721 NFT standard, who is both advisor and lead on smart contracts.
Area NFTs are the foundation of the Area ecosystem. They are divisible pieces of virtual land in the real world sold in 4,000 packs of 10 random Areas. Once acquired, the NFTs can be traded in Area’s own on-chain decentralized marketplace. All of Area’s NFT code is open source and anyone can build on top of the platform. Ownership of Areas also serves as an entry ticket into the Area community which is made up not only of NFT futurists, but also travel enthusiasts, explorers, adventurers and photographers.
Beyond the initial sale, Area is onboarding publishers of location-based content, product and services into its ecosystem. These include not only external parties, but also in-house ventures.
The first in-house venture by Area is Light, a publisher of highly-curated fine art photography NFTs. Light aims to reimagine the ways we create, collect, interact with, and build communities around art, while also honoring the foundations of good photography developed over the last 200 years. Light is led by Elia Locardi with a curation board made up of well-known traditional photographers, art collectors and NFT-native experts. Light will geolocate most of its photos so they can easily integrate within Area’s broader ecosystem. Light is set to launch by May 2022.
The second in-house venture by Area is the Explorer’s Guild, a curator of experiences and a community focused on travel and exploration. The Explorer’s Guild will be a travel community powered by NFT technology that brings together the exclusiveness of unique experiences with the openness of web3.
“I love virtual worlds, but I don’t want to spend all of my time looking through a VR headset tied to a computer. I started Area for people like me. People who want to enjoy the real world, but are excited about the possibilities of web3. Technology has connected us globally, empowered us as individuals, and expanded our minds. However, it has also disconnected us from local communities, created monopolies, and harmed our mental health. The disconnect between virtual worlds and the real world is partly to blame. This is why we are building a layer of digital activity on top of the real world. We call it the metasurface, a bridge between the digital and physical worlds so we don’t have to choose between the two. We believe the metaverse is not going to be a virtual world we escape to, but it will be a combination of digital experiences in the world we live in.” Founder Marcos Siqueira
In the future, Area hopes to create a non-digital marketplace for services and experiences, real world clubhouses, augmented reality NFTs, and geolocation games.
To sign up for the white paper, visit https://area.world/
For more information, visit https://area.world/
New DeFi platform CreDA looks to de-risk the world of crypto
CreDA (Credit DeFi Alliance), the world’s first decentralized credit rating service has officially launched its platform following a successful open beta. Modeled after traditional consumer credit agencies, CreDA introduces the concept of personal credit scores into the $200 billion decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem populated by cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Dogecoin and Ethereum.
Leveraging existing blockchain infrastructure, CreDA provides a trust architecture for the relatively young and volatile ecosystem and a link between on-chain and traditional financial systems. It aims to simplify transactions for users, minimize risk for lenders and enable access to capital without the need for high amounts of collateral which is currently required by DeFi lenders.
According to Bank of America, over 200 million users are now part of the digital asset universe, yet very few financial institutions would provide them with a loan. Even within the DeFi space, lenders operate in an over-collateralized manner with typical loan-to-value (LTV) ratios below 50 per cent. This means that a DeFi platform with a 50 percent LTV would require a user to deposit at least $10,000 to take out a loan of $5,000. Also most platforms only accept crypto assets as a form of collateral, creating further barriers for participation.
“In traditional finance, the total value of credit-based, unsecured loans is several times that of collateralized mortgage loans,” explains Cassie Zhang, CreDA’s Chief Operating Officer. “Credit ratings are a vital, missing component within the DeFi space. The introduction of CreDA credit scores will enable unprecedented imagination and innovation to protocol users and developers alike. But more importantly, CreDA fulfills the promise of blockchain and decentralized finance, providing the trust architecture needed to unlock capital for the billions of people without access to traditional banking.”
CreDA will allow users to link their wallets, mint a credit NFT (cNFT) and borrow low or non-collateralized loans all from within the same platform. Users will also be able to use their cNFT on partner platforms to avail similar benefits as well as other incentives for staking and lending. At launch, CreDA’s partners include: UniSwap, SushiSwap, Elastos, FilDA, PolyNetwork, O3 Swap, WePiggy, Channels, and dForce.
How the credit scoring works:
CreDA provides on-chain credit ratings using the CreDA Oracle, which employs artificial intelligence (AI) to examine the user’s historical transactions in the crypto space across multiple blockchains. This data is used to calculate a credit score that is then minted into a secure non-fungible token called a credit NFT (cNFT). The cNFT enables the user to unlock preferential rates and incentives across a variety of use cases e.g. reduced borrowing rates on DeFi platforms.
Built on the Ethereum Layer 2 network, CreDA will operate across multiple chains including Arbitrum, BSC (Binance Smart Chain), Polkadot, Polygon, HECO (Huobi ECO Chain) and ESC (Elastos Sidechain).
According to CreDA’s developers, the Credit Oracle has already retrieved the data of billions of on-chain activities related to more than 50 million addresses. This large initial data pool helps to build a reliable and trustful credit model that will continue improving as more data is collected from users who connect and mint their credit scores.
One major focus for CreDA is ensuring a safe and secure experience for users. To do this, data is fully protected, secured by industry leading, W3C compliant DIDs, which are minted as part of a users cNFT. For launch, CreDA is also undergoing a strict security audit with a leading blockchain security group, Certik, and will perform similar audits regularly.
The aim for the CreDA protocol is to eventually combine traditional (off-chain) and blockchain (on-chain) data to compute a holistic user credit score that allows for more flexibility and access between people’s virtual and ‘real world’ lives. This will become even more relevant as technology advances and society continues to embrace virtual spaces, such as the Metaverse.
“As Benjamin Franklin once said, ‘If you want to know the value of money, try borrowing some!’ says Zhang. “The DeFi landscape is quickly evolving, but there is still one factor that is missing — credibility. The CreDA protocol enables DeFi platforms to model risk profiles across their user base and offer personalized rates and services, making them more competitive versus industry peers.
“CreDA finally gives credit to the communities, the decentralized global networks of researchers and technologists who are building this new digital landscape. And it enhances the experience for the growing numbers of people who are questioning the restraints of the old financial systems and who want to get in on the action.”
Through participation in the CreDA protocol and virtuous on-chain activity, users can benefit from preferential margin rates, improved credit ratings, and a range of incentives based on their credit score.
Fulfilling the promise of DeFi
In the early days of DeFi and blockchain technology, there was a vision that by decentralizing the industry, there will be improved access to capital for people who don’t have access to traditional banking. However, the reality hasn’t been so straightforward, as the lack of trust in the system means that lenders must de-risk by demanding crippling amounts of collateral, which has become the standard in DeFi.
CreDA fulfills the promise of blockchain and decentralized finance, providing the trust architecture needed to unlock capital for the billions of people without access to traditional banking. What’s more, by turning people’s crypto experience into creditworthiness, CreDA legitimizes peoples on-chain behaviour, which can allow for greater access to traditional loans.
“Whether you’re a rural farmer in sub-Saharan Africa or a fresh college graduate in Los Angeles, there are still a lot of barriers for accessing capital within the traditional financial systems,” says William Zhang, Security Architecture Lead at The World Bank Group and advocate for data as capital. “While blockchain and DeFi have helped democratize data and finance, there is still a lack of trust that can be limiting for people without existing collateral. But a solution that provides access by rewarding good on-chain behaviour and allows new users to earn trust within the system could unlock new possibilities for nearly 2 billion people around the world.”
Social Links
Twitter: https://twitter.com/credafinance
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/creda-finance
Media Contact
Company Name: CreDA (Credit DeFi Alliance)
Contact Person: Jamie Read, CMO
Company E-mail: press@creda.app
Website: www.creda.app
Mostexpensive Platform Official Launch on WOW Summit
In mid-October, the world’s first hybrid NFT (NFTH) platform Mostexpensive will be launched at the largest NFT and crypto market event in the MENA region – WOW summit.
The official launch of the platform is linked with the off-line event taking place at Palm Atlantis, Dubai. The two NFTHs available on the platform – a real ball and a tennis racket connected with NFT of the world’s second tennis player Daniil Medvedev with his signature ( https://www.instagram.com/p/CRBKrH7JQCp ). The initial price of the ball is 5,000 USD, the initial price of the racket is 10,000 USD.
Mostexpensive launch scheduled on October 14 at 10 AM (GMT+4).
What is hybrid NFT?
NFTH is undivided non-fungible tokens backed by real items. It is an item and its digital certificate that proves the right of its ownership.
Mostexpensive is the world’s first platform that offers NFTH. Over the past six months, drastic fluctuations took place on the NFT market – mainly because it is pretty complicated to determine the actual value of such tokens.
The Mostexpensive platform offers real rare items that will be of collectors and investors interest and definitely will not lose value over time, but their price will only grow.
All transactions on the platform are executed through smart contracts, that guarantee the reliability and security of user data, funds, and rights.
The platform got support from large companies Tangem and the FreeTON blockchain protocol, which confirms the viability of the project`s concept.
After successfully completing the Private round, the platform launches a Pre-sale round to raise funds for the native MXP token. The platform offers the possibility of partial purchase of lots with their further resale or use in the DeFi bank, which launch is planned shortly. It will allow receiving additional benefits from each NFTH through staking.
Mostexpensive will offer items of the following categories – rare cars, art objects, musical works, celebrities paraphernalia and things, sports.
Exclusive items copyright owners also gain benefit from working with the platform as they receive a commission from every sale of their item.
The Mostexpensive platform creates a digital ecosystem for the collectors’ market, transferring it to online sales, and may turn out to be the first digital analog to Sotheby’s and Christie’s, keeping a particular niche in the market.
It is quite easy to buy NFTH on the platform – all you got to do is connect a cryptocurrency wallet and choose the item you like.
For more information, visit
Website: https://mostexpensive.io/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mostexpensive.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mostexpensiveio
Media Queries
Alex Pechini, Mostexpensive Media Office
E-mail: INFO@MOSTEXPENSIVE.io
SOURCE: Mostexpensive
Topic: Press release summary
