2013 APSA Academy Children's Film Fund Panel

Anne Démy-Geroe is a Co-Director of the Iranian Film Festival Australia and was the Artistic Director then Executive Director of the Brisbane International Film Festival from 1991 to 2009. Her interest in Asian cinema led to the establishment of the sole Australian NETPAC jury at the Brisbane International Film Festival and a FIPRESCI jury for Asia Pacific cinema.

Démy-Geroe, a NETPAC board member, has recently completed a PhD on Iranian Cinema at The University of Queensland and teaches Asia Pacific Cinema at Griffith Film School.

She was an organiser for the Queensland Images Film Festival in 1989, and worked on the annual Queensland New Filmmakers Awards for many years, as well as silent film festivals and Queensland regional film festivals. She was a judge for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and a past Council Member of the National Film and Sound Archive. She has served on international juries from Hawaii to Tehran for NETPAC and others. In 2003, Démy-Geroe was awarded an Australian Centenary Medal for services to the film industry.

Born in Iran in 1976, Maryam Ebrahimi studied at the Art University of Tehran and continued her education at the University of Konstfack in Stockholm, where she now lives and works. She has made several artistic videos with political and social themes.

Ebrahimi was inducted into the APSA Academy in 2011 for her documentary I Was Worth 50 Sheep – a tragic story about the selling of young girls in Afghanistan in the name of marriage, for a piece of land or sheep – which won the 2011 APSA Best Documentary Feature Film.

In the same year, she received a $US25,000 grant from the MPA APSA Academy Film Fund to develop her feature documentary No Burqas Behind Bars, which went on to premiere in November 2012 at the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam, the world’s leading documentary festival, and receive a nomination for the 2013 APSA Best Documentary Feature Film. Ebrahimi is currently filming her new feature documentary The Confiscated Images.

Graeme Isaac has worked as a producer for more than 30 years across both drama and documentary genres, with his films screened and awarded in film festivals worldwide. He has worked on many crosscultural projects, producing films with indigenous filmmakers and communities in Australia as well as consulting in Indonesia on both drama features and documentaries.

His feature musical Bran Nue Dae was the number two Australian box office hit of 2010, screened in competition in Berlin, Toronto and Sundance and was a 2010 APSA nominee for Best Children’s Feature Film.

His two previous documentaries, Dhakiyarr Vs The King and In My Father’s Country, screened in competition at Sundance, Amsterdam, Jerusalem, Vancouver and Chicago. Isaac is also an organiser and selector for INPUT, the international public interest television conference, and was co-director of last year’s international conference held in Sydney.