2017 International Nominations Council

Hong-Joon Kim was Festival Director of the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival and Commissioner of the Korean Film Council from 2000-2005. His published books include I, a Filmmaker: Kim Hong-Joon’s Film Notes and Two or Three Things You Want to Know About Movies. Hong-Joon Kim is an award-winning director, and screenwriter of films including Jungle Story and La Vie En Rose. He hosted and co-wrote the television series Korean Classical Cinema Special.

Dr. Gulnara Abikeyeva is an award-winning Kazakh author, film critic and film researcher. Currently a professor of film history and theory at Turan University in Almaty, Gulnara was formerly the artistic director of the International Film Festival Eurasia in Almaty, and has launched five cinema magazines. In 2001-2002 she was a Fulbright scholar at Bowdoin College, read lectures in Pittsburgh University and made presentations in Harvard, Yale, Tafts Universities in the US. She is the author of ten books about cinema, mostly about Kazakhstan and Central Asian countries. As a member of FIPRESCI and NETPAC, she has been a jury member at several international film festivals.

Kiki Fung is film critic, curator and former Head Programmer for Brisbane International Film Festival and its successor, Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival. She is currently industry consultant for APSA. She is a contributor for the Hong Kong International Film Festival, has guest-curated for the Brisbane Festival and Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and was Film Program Manager for the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Before moving to Australia in 2010, she served at the Hong Kong Film Archive for seven years and assisted in editing three volumes of Hong Kong Filmography, among others. She is a member of NETPAC and Hong Kong Film Critics Society. Fung has just been named Jury President of the Duhok International Film Festival.

Born in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1973, Shawkat Amin Korki and his family fled from military oppression in 1975, living in exile in Iran for 25 years. Korki returned home and wrote, directed and produced his first feature film in Iraqi Kurdistan, Crossing The Dust, in 2006. The film won many international prizes and was nominated for the inaugural APSA for Achievement in Directing. His second feature Kick Off (2009) won twelve international awards including Busan’s New Currents Award and FIPRESCI Prize. His third feature, Memories on Stone (2014), has won fourteen awards internationally to date including in 2014 Best Film from the Arab World at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, the coveted APSA UNESCO Award and was Iraq’s official Academy Awards® submission. Korki lives and works in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan.

Julie Rigg has been a journalist since 1960, a broadcaster since 1973 and a film critic since 1988. Her last show, before retiring from fulltime broadcasting at ABC Radio National, was Movietime (2004 to 2013). She won the BP Arts Media award in 1989, the Geraldine Pascall award for her film criticism in 2003, and has served on critics’ juries at film festivals around the world, including San Sebastián, Toronto, Venice, Havana and Dubai, as well as the jury for the Sydney Film Prize in 2011, a NETPAC jury, and an Australia Korea Foundation delegation to Seoul and Busan. From 2013 to 2015, she wrote monthly for ABC Television’s ARTS ONLINE and remains a freelancer journalist. She has attended every APSA ceremony.

Meenakshi Shedde is the South Asia Consultant to the Berlin Film Festival, and Consultant to the Dubai International Film Festival, based in Mumbai, India. She has been India/Asia Curator and Consultant to the Toronto, Locarno, Busan, World Cinema Amsterdam, Kerala and Mumbai film festivals and the International Film Festival of India (IFFI-Goa). A journalist for 30 years and winner of India’s National Award for Best Film Critic, she has been on the jury of 20 international film festivals, including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Karlovy Vary and Taipei. Meenakshi has mentored filmmakers, screenwriters and critics at various festivals around the world and has written for 12 books.