2021 APSA Selection Panel

Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Delegate, Berlin Film Festival, pre-selecting films since 1998, and independent film curator, based in Mumbai. Winner of India’s National Film Award for Best Film Critic, she has been on the jury of 20 international film festivals, including Cannes, Berlin and Venice. She has been Script Mentor/Consultant on Script Labs worldwide, and is on the selection committees of top script and film funds in the US, Europe and Asia. These include the Sundance Institute Screenwriters’ Labs-India, Venice Film Festival’s Biennale College Cinema, Locarno Film Festival, Hubert Bals Fund- IFF Rotterdam, Asia Pacific Screen Lab, Australia; National Film Development Corp, India, Sultana’s Dream, an all-women lab addressing sexual abuse, Bangladesh; and Clinik, Docskool, Nepal. She has been Curator/Programmer/Consultant with the Berlin Film Festival, TIFF Cinematheque-Toronto, Locarno, Busan, Dubai Film Festivals; British Film Institute and Asia Pacific Screen Awards, Australia. A journalist, she freelances for Variety, Screen International, Sight & Sound, Film Comment and Cahiers du Cinema; is a columnist with Midday, and has written for/edited 21 books.

Iranian/Australian filmmaker Faramarz K-Rahber has specialized in producing and directing documentary films since graduating from Griffith Film School in 2000. Nominated for an AFI award for Best Direction in Documentary for his debut film Fahimeh’s Story, he subsequently received worldwide acclaim for Donkey in Lahore which screened at Tribeca Film Festival and IDFA in Amsterdam. During the course of his career he has won a number of awards for his films, which tend to theme around cultural identity and diversity. Faramarz is an associate of Emmy International and a member of AACTA and ASC.

CARL JOSEPH PAPA is a software engineer by profession but filmmaking has always been his passion. He first dabbled in filmmaking by making experimental and animated short films which have been showcased locally and internationally. His first feature experimental film, The Unforgetting, won NETPAC Jury Prize in QCinema International Film Festival 2014. In 2015 he made his first animated feature film Manang Biring. It was the first animated film to compete and to win Best Film in Cinema One Originals Film Festival 2015. The film also competed and was showcased in several international film festivals and is the first full length animated Filipino film to be selected for Annecy International Animated Film Festival, the premier festival worldwide for animation. In 2017 he made the stop-motion animated short film Love Bites, a finalist in QCinema International Film Festival 2017 and the Grand Prize winner of Animahenasyon 2018, a Philippines based animation festival. In 2018 he made his second animated feature film The Leaving (Paglisan) which won best film in 2018 Cinema One Original Film Festival. The film was also recognised by a number of local film awards.