2014 APSA Academy Children's Film Fund Panel

Anne Démy-Geroe is 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 for 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 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.

A true lover of the arts, Nira Benegal contributes to and supports a diverse range of artistic disciplines including film, literature, music, architecture and design.

Born in Lahore in 1939, Benegal attended the American boarding school Woodstock in the Himalayas, and later completed her BA Honours in History at the University of Delhi.

Benegal had a long and successful career as an editor for the leading publisher of children’s books, India Book House. She later joined Inside Outside, India’s first and foremost design magazine, as Assistant Editor where she remained for the first three years of its publication.

Currently, Benegal is a member of the Film Selection Committee for the Mumbai Film Festival.

She is also a member of the Managing Committee of the Mehli Mehta Music Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that promotes western classical music through the presentation of high-quality concerts and music education for children. Recently she volunteered to help with the annual Tata Literature Live Festival, Mumbai’s largest international literature festival.

Benegal is married to master filmmaker Shyam Benegal.

Rupert Lloyd has spent the majority of his film career working in the editorial department, most notably as an assistant editor on the six-time Academy Award winner The Hurt Locker. More recently he worked as an Editor on Mahmoud Al-Massad’s award winning second feature, This Is My Picture When I Was Dead.

After producing Naji Abu Nowar’s short film Death of a Boxer, Lloyd founded Noor Pictures to pursue a career as an independent producer and produced and edited Naji Abu Nowar’s debut feature Theeb. Premiering at the 71^st Venice Film Festival Theeb went onto play at the Toronto International Film Festival, the BFI London Film Festival, Mumbai Film Festival and Abu Dhabi Film Festival. In Venice Naji Abu Nowar was awarded the Orrizonti Award for Best Director and was named Variety’s Arab Filmmaker of the Year in Abu Dhabi where the film also received the FIPRESCI award for Best Narrative Feature and Best Arab Film in the New Horizons section.