2021 SDAFF 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 experimental film. Additionally, the jury selects a Grand Jury winner and an optional Special Jury mention. For the fifth year, the San Diego Asian Film Festival also 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 2021 SDAFF Award Winners will be announced on Saturday, November 6th at the SDAFF Awards Gala.
THE 2021 SDAFF ASIAN AMERICAN COMPETITION JURY
Peter X Feng is Associate Professor of English and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Delaware, the author of Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video, and the editor of Screening Asian Americans. In 2008, he programmed and co-hosted “Asian Images on Film” for Turner Classic Movies. He has attended and contributed to Asian American film festivals in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Haven, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and New York, and now San Diego. He lives in Delaware with his wife, two cats, and too many DVDs, CDs, and LPs.
Keisha N. Knight is the Managing and Artistic Director of Sentient.Art.Film where she works to create networks of circulation and support for films and their makers. Keisha recently co-curated, with Abby Sun, My Sight Is Lined with Visions: 1990s Asian American Film & Video and co-developed the Line of Sight filmmaker fellowship from this series. Keisha has been a programmer at the New York African Film Festival and the Maryland Film Festival as well as a jury member for festivals such as the SEE Film Festival in Los Angeles and the Milwaukee Film Festival. She has also been on the screening committee of the Sundance Film Festival. Keisha is currently Visiting Faculty in Media Studies at Bennington College and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University in Film and Visual Studies.
Phuong Le is a Vietnamese film critic based in Paris. A regular contributor to The Guardian and BBC Radio 3, she also writes a monthly column called Cine Wanderer for Sight & Sound where she explores the relationship between cinema and psychogeography. Her writing can also be found in The Guardian, Film Comment, and other outlets.
Meena Nanji is an award-winning filmmaker who has produced, written, and directed independent documentaries, experimental videos, and short narratives. Her films include View From a Grain of Sand, Voices of the Morning Here and Away, and others, and have been featured on Al Jazeera, BBC, and PBS. Nanji has taught at universities and curated several festivals including at Outfest in Los Angeles. She is a co-founder of GlobalGirl Media a non-profit that trains girls from underrepresented communities of the world in digital media and citizen journalism. She is currently working on a documentary feature about contemporary colonial impacts in Kenya.
THE 2021 SDAFF INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM JURY
Martin Edralin is a Filipino-Canadian, Toronto-based filmmaker. His first short film, Hole (2014), won the Grand Prize at Clermont-Ferrand, jury prizes at Locarno and Seattle, and screened at Sundance, TIFF, and BFI London. His second short, Emma (2016), was selected in TIFF Canada’s Top Ten and won Best Live Action Short at the Rhode Island IFF. His debut feature, Islands (2021), premiered at SXSW and was awarded Special Jury Recognition for Breakthrough Performance.
Kristine Estorninos began her film career in the Philippines, eventually moving to Canada and advising on festival distribution strategies for short films. She has curated and juried for local and international film festivals, most recently with the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival as their Head of Programming until 2019. She currently manages international film and television in-flight content for airlines.
Maggie Lee has been film critic for entertainment media Variety since 2012. She programs Asian films for the Tokyo International Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, and Vancouver Asian Film Festival. She set up Japan’s Short Shorts Film Festival Asia, and belonged to S Express — a network circulating Southeast Asian shorts.
