2016: A Peek at the Numbers

by | Jul 13, 2016 | 12th Edition (2016), Articles & Resources, News & Happenings

It’s a wrap! It’s been almost two weeks since we closed this year’s call for festival submissions and workshop applications, and we are hard at work looking at each and every entry. The results for both the festival programme and workshop participants will be announced by the end of July. (Don’t worry about having to constantly check back here, everyone will be notified directly about the results via email.)

In the meantime, we thought it might be interesting to share with you some highlights and observations from this year’s open call. We do review the statistics each year to see how we can improve our outreach, and it is also interesting for us to note how the dynamics of Asia’s photographic community changes each year.

2016 Workshops Applications

In a year when the photographic community came forward to initiate and sponsor the first Angkor Travel Grant, there were double celebrations all round when we set a new record of 380 workshop applications this year. The 60% increase from 2015 was only the icing on the cake — we found that the number of female applicants doubled, increasing the proportion from 30% in 2015 to 40% this year!

Also doubled were applications the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia — not so coincidentally, these are also the countries currently involved in the Angkor Travel Grant!

Applications streamed in from a total of 18 Asian countries, with China making the most impressive leap in terms of the number of applications.  (A huge thanks to alumni Yan Cong, for publishing this beautiful collection of testimonies from her fellow batchmates in Mandarin!)  For the first time, China made it to the list of top five countries with the most number of applications, joining India, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Although we did see an increase in applications from most countries, we were saddened by a drop from both Iran and Thailand. However, this only strengthens our resolve to work harder at increasing out exposure and reach. We did receive our first applications from Azerbaijan, and after a long break, we are happy to once again see entries from Sri Lanka!

2016 Festival Submissions

While the total number of submissions for the festival remained almost the same as 2015, there were impressive increases from a few countries such as Russia, the U.K., Philippines, Indonesia and Turkey. In fact, two countries – Turkey and Greece – made their maiden appearance on the list of the top 20 countries from which we received the most number of entries.
When grouped into larger regions, submissions from both Europe and the Asia Pacific continue to form the majority. We are still working to increase our exposure in countries in Central and South America as well as the African continent, which we would love to be able to see a lot more work from. We did however notice ‘new’ countries submitting for the first time from these regions, such as Bolivia, Honduras, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Uruguay.