Festival Jurors

SDAFF is a competitive film festival aiming to celebrate achievements in Asian American cinema. An independent jury of filmmakers, curators, critics, academics, and other professionals is chosen to view films and select winners in the following categories: narrative feature, documentary feature, narrative short, documentary short, and animated short. Additionally, the jury selects a Grand Jury winner and optional Special Jury mentions. For the fourth year, the San Diego Asian Film Festival hosts a competition for international short films. This competition highlights some of the most innovative work produced in Asia and encompasses narrative, experimental, and documentary forms. The 2020 SDAFF Award Winners will be announced on Sunday, November 1st at the SDAFF Awards Gala.

THE 2020 SDAFF ASIAN AMERICAN COMPETITION JURY

VICCI HO has worked in festival programming since 2006, including as Director of the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Assistant Director of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (now CAAMFest), Programming Associate for the Toronto International Film Festival, and as Asian film consultant for festivals in North America and Europe. She is currently programmer for Chinese and East Asian cinema for the New Zealand International Film Festival, and is a co-creator of the upcoming tabletop game “Battle of the Boy Bands.”

GINA MARCHETTI is Professor of Comparative Literature at Hong Kong University, and is the author of the books Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction, From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens: Race, Sex, and Cinema, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s INFERNAL AFFAIRS—The Trilogy, and Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema.

OMME-SALMA RAHEMTULLAH has spent the last 15 years in community media programming, most recently as the Assistant Director of Programming at a nonprofit arthouse theatre in Columbia, SC, where she curated film through a community-informed programming imperative that brought community members, activists, and academics into the film programming process. She is currently teaching Film Programming at the University of South Carolina and working in Impact Producing with Impact Media Partners. Omme is a 2020/2021 South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) Archival Creators Fellow.

HAM TRAN is a two-time Student Academy Award finalist and the director of Journey from the Fall, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, went on to win 16 international festival awards for Best Feature Film, was the first Vietnamese film released by Netflix, and was listed by the LA Times as one of the best 20 Asian American films of the last 20 years. He is also the director of the romantic comedy How to Fight in Six-Inch Heels, which won a Golden Kite Award, and Bitcoin Heist, which was released by Well Go USA.

THE 2020 SDAFF INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM JURY

DANIEL HUI is a filmmaker and writer. A graduate of the film program in California Institute of the Arts, he is one of the founding members of 13 Little Pictures, a critically acclaimed independent film collective in Singapore. He has made three feature-length films — Eclipses (Pixel Bunker Award for International New Talent, Doclisboa IFF 2013), Snakeskin (Special Jury Award TFFDoc, Torino FF 2014; Award of Excellence, Yamagata IDFF 2015; Special Jury Mention, RIDM 2015), and Demons (In Competition, Kim Jiseok Award, Busan IFF 2018; Berlinale Forum 2019).

DONSARON KOVITVANITCHA is a film writer, critic, and journalist for magazines and newspapers in Thailand. He also works for Bangkok ASEAN Film Festival as programmer. Donsaron is also an independent film producer, including for The Blue Hour (Anucha Boonyawatana, Berlin Panorama), Malila: The Farewell Flower (Anucha Boonyawatana, Winner of Kim Ji-Seok Award, Busan International Film Festival), and Die Tomorrow (Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, Berlin Forum).

K. F. WATANABE is the Deputy Director of Film at Japan Society in New York City where he oversees year-round film programming including JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film, the largest festival of contemporary Japanese cinema in North America. His writing on film has appeared in Film Comment, The Brooklyn Rail, The Current (The Criterion Collection), and Notebook (MUBI), among other online and print publications.