2023 APSA Selection Panel

With more than 40 years of film industry experience, Jeannette Paulson Hereniko is best known as the founding director of the Hawaii International Film Festival, a position she held from 1981 to 1996. She is also the founding director of the Palm Springs International Film Festival, which she started in 1990 with the late Mayor Sonny Bono. She’s been a jury member for International Film Festivals such as Berlin, Singapore, Hanoi, Mumbai, and Manila, and was a founding board member of NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asia Pacific Cinema) as well as the Founder/Director of NETPAC/USA from 1992 until 2015. In 2009 she was awarded the Korean Cinema Award from the Busan International Film Festival that is given to individuals who have made outstanding contributions in promoting Korean cinema to the world film community. She produced, wrote and directed several documentaries before producing Pear ta ma ‘on maf (The Land Has Eyes) in 2004, the first narrative feature film ever nominated from Fiji for consideration for “best foreign language film.” The film had its world premiere in Sundance and won Best feature film at Toronto’s ImagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival She served on the international Nominations Council for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards and was awarded the MPA APSA Academy Film Fund in 2013 for script development of a narrative feature film set in the Marshall Islands. Currently she is President and Producer of Te Maka Productions, Inc. a film and theatre production company. She is also a writer and performer of one woman shows with When Strangers Meet, which is based on her film adventures.

An ex-pat New Zealander, Maryanne arrived in Berlin in 1985 with a BA in classical studies and a post-grad Diploma in Drama/Theater Studies – and ended up staying. Amongst other things, she has been a multi-media performance artist, theatre technician, experimental filmmaker, translator, drama teacher for people living with disabilities and has given art lessons to young Aboriginal people in Central Australia. She is also an authorised teacher of the Feldenkrais method. In the mid-nineties she began work at the Berlinale, and was Head of Berlinale Generation from 2007-2022, where she was in the position to develop that brilliant platform, giving young and young at heart audiences access to challenging, state -of- the-art-films-that-matter, from around the world, As Head Curator for the Berlinale special series: NATIVe – A Journey into Indigenous Cinema (2011-2019), she co-created a platform which shone the light on and gave added context to a vast body of genius international Indigenous cinematic story telling – and to the tellers. As member of the Berlinale Competition selection committee (2009-2019), and as official Festival Delegate for Australia and New Zealand (2004 -2020), Maryanne gained in-depth knowledge of the cinema-industry and its players. A member of both the European Film Academy (EFA) and the Asia Pacific Screen Academy (APSA), she is presently working as mentor and consultant for different projects in the field of cinema in Europe and Australasia.

Internationally published film journalist and critic with work featured in Australian, American, Korean and European publications. Producer of Portable Occupation, an experimental Chinese documentary, and Colonel Panics, a Japanese cyberpunk horror film.