2021 International Jury

Born in Vietnam and living in France since 1975, Tran Anh Hung studied filmmaking in Paris at l’École Nationale Louis Lumière from 1985 to 1987. His directorial debut The Scent of Green Papaya (1992) won him a reputation internationally by winning Camera d’Or and the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 46th Cannes Film Festival and the Best First Film Award at the 19th Cesar Awards. The film was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His second film, Cyclo (1995), is the gritty story of a struggling cyclo driver (Hong Kong star Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) navigating the underworld of Ho Chi Minh City. The film won the Golden Lion Award for the Best Film at the 52nd Venice Film Festival. His next film was his third film set in Vietnam, The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000), and followed the lives of three sisters living in Hanoi. It marks his first collaboration with APSA winning cinematographer Mark Ping Bing Lee, who has gone on to shoot all of Hùng’s films to date. His next feature was the English language thriller I Come With The Rain (2009), starring Josh Hartnett. This was followed by the Japanese language adaptation of the internationally acclaimed eponymous Murakami novel, Norwegian Wood (2010). Starring Rinko Kikuchi and Kenichi Matsuyama, it premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival before going on to be released internationally. His most recent film, Eternity (2016), is an adaptation of the Alice Ferney novel ‘L’Elegance des veuves’ (The Elegance of Widows), was his first film in French language and starred Audrey Tautou, Berenice Bejo and Melanie Laurent.

Palestine’s leading female filmmaker, Annemarie Jacir has written, directed and produced over sixteen films. Two of her films have premiered as Official Selections in Cannes, one in Berlin and in Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam, Toronto and Telluride. All three of her feature films were selected as Palestine’s Oscar Entry for Foreign Language Film. Her short film Like Twenty Impossibles (2003) was the first Arab short film in history to be an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival and continued to break ground when it went on to be a finalist for the Academy Awards. Jacir became an APSA Academy Member in 2013 with the nomination of When I Saw You (Lamma Shoftak) for Best Children’s Feature Film. In 2015, her treatment for Wajib secured an MPA APSA Academy Film Fund grant for script development. Premiering in 2017, Wajib won 36 international awards including Best Film in Mar Del Plata, Dubai, Amiens, DC Film Festival and Kerala Film Festivals and received a jury mention at the London BFI Festival. Actors Mohamed and Saleh Bakri were nominated for the APSA Best Performance by an Actor for their roles. 

Nashen Moodley, who graduated from the University of Natal, South Africa, has written for prominent newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian, The Mail, GQ and The Sunday Tribune. He has served as Director of Sydney Film Festival for 10 years since 2012, a period of remarkable growth of the festival. From 2001 to 2011 he was the head programmer and Manager of the Durban International Film Festival. From 2005 to 2017 he served as a programming consultant for the Dubai International Film Festival. From 2013 to 2017 he was the director of Cinema of the World at the Dubai International Film Festival. He has been a member of the jury at prestigious film festivals such as Busan, San Sebastian, Tokyo, Toronto, Rotterdam and Durban.

Sooni Taraporevala an Indian photographer, screenwriter and filmmaker is best known for her screenplays of the films Mississippi Masala for which she won the Osella Award at the Venice International Film Festival, the Oscar nominated Salaam Bombay! for which she won the Lillian Gish Award for Excellence in Film from Women in Film L.A., Such A Long Journey for which she won a Genie nomination from the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television, The Namesake, and Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar. The first film she directed which she also wrote, Little Zizou, won an Indian national award. Most recently she wrote and directed the Netflix Original feature film Yeh Ballet which is screening worldwide.

Sooni’s photographs have been exhibited around the world and are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art New Delhi and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She is the author of two books of photography, Parsis:A Photographic Journey and Home in the City Bombay 1977-Mumbai 2017. She was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2014.

Janet is the General Manager of Bright East (Beijing) Films Co. Ltd, President of Heaven Pictures, and Director of China Film Foundation – Wu Tianming Film Fund for Young Talents. 

Heaven Pictures (Beijing) Film Co., Ltd. was founded in 2012, and has since committed to working with young filmmakers, supporting freedom of expression in the art of film. Each of their films is a brave exploration of contemporary Chinese society, probing questions that more mainstream commercial films cannot. The company focuses on film project development, investment, production and distribution. Among the directors Heaven Pictures supported include: Hao Jie, Yang Jin, Li Ruijun, Pema Tseden, Peng Tao, Bi Gan, Song Fang and many other new rising Chinese directors.