26th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival - March 13-23, 2008

Awards

The San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival recognizes the extraordinary achievements of Asian American filmmakers through our Juried Competition and Audience Awards. The competition nominees represent the best in Asian American filmmaking from the current year.

• Comcast Audience Awards
• Narrative Competition
• Documentary Competition

Comcast Audience Awards

All feature-length films (with the exception of retrospective works) are eligible for the Audience Award, which is presented in two categories: Narrative Feature and Documentary Feature. The winners will be selected by YOU, the members of our audience, and will be announced at the Closing Night Screening March 20, 2008.

Be sure to take a ballot and make your vote count! Just tear a ballot along the edge indicating your opinion of the film—1 for “poor” and 5 for “excellent”—and drop it in the ballot boxes as you leave the theaters.

Past Audience Award Winners.

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Narrative Competition

This year’s Narrative Competition consists of eight exciting new films, including four world premieres. The nominees feature familiar actors and directors, as well as some promising new talent. Taking on issues that range from love and sex to table tennis, the films provoke, entertain and exhibit the best in Asian American cinema.

The Best Narrative Award is presented to the best feature-length narrative film by or about Asian Americans or Asian Canadians, as selected by a three-person jury. The winner will be announced at the Closing Night Screening March 20, 2008.

Click here for the full list of nominated films. Past Narrative Award Winners.

The Narrative Jury

Philip Kan Gotanda is an independent filmmaker (Life Tastes Good, SFIAAFF ‘99) as well as an internationally recognized playwright. Through his plays, films and advocacy, he has been instrumental in bringing stories of Asians to the American consciousness. Gotanda holds a law degree from Hastings College of Law and studied pottery in Japan with the late Hiroshi Seto. He is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship as well as other awards and honors.

Gina Kwon is an independent producer based in Los Angeles. Her projects include Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, which won the prestigious Camera D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival; Michael Kang’s The Motel, and Miguel Arteta’s Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl. Kwon was also the recipient of the Mark Silverman/Sundance Institute Fellowship for Producers and the Independent Spirit Producer’s Award. She is currently in development on a number of projects, including new films from Arteta and July.

Iris Yamashita is a Japanese American screenwriter who was nominated for an Academy Award along with co-story writer Paul Haggis for her first produced screenplay, Letters From Iwo Jima. Directed by Clint Eastwood, Letters was named Best Picture by both the National Board of Review and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. It also received a Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Language Film of 2006 and was nominated for four Oscars.

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Documentary Competition

This year’s Documentary Competition includes seven documentaries that explore some of the most pressing and intriguing issues in Asian America. Far-reaching, personal, uplifting and thought-provoking, these select films prove themselves heavy contenders in the genre of documentary filmmaking.

The Best Documentary Award is presented to the best feature-length documentary film by or about Asian Americans or Asian Canadians, as selected by a three-person jury. The winner will be announced at the Closing Night Screening March 20, 2008.

Click here for the full list of nominated films. Past Documentary Award Winners.

The Documentary Jury

Kathyrn Lo is the Associate Director of Program Development and Independent Film at PBS. She also curates PBS’ Independent Lens, the weekly Emmy Award-winning anthology showcase for independent film, working with Independent Television Service (ITVS). She recently co-produced two seasons of Realidades, a short documentary series from Los Angeles PBS member station KCET, which aired as part of Gregory Nava’s acclaimed PBS drama American Family. Her previous experience includes working as the program director for a public radio in Los Angeles and as a journalist in print and radio.

Stanley Nelson is a Bay Area-based documentary filmmaker whose award-winning works have screened around the world. Best known for his groundbreaking historical documentaries, Nelson won an Emmy and a Sundance Special Jury Prize for The Murder of Emmett Till. He has won numerous awards for his other works, which include A Place of Our Own and The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords. His most recent film is Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple. A 2002 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, Nelson is the Executive Producer of Firelight Media.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu is Associate Professor of Asian American, Film, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an award-winning filmmaker (The Fact of Asian Women; Super Flip; Mahal Means Love and Expensive, and the upcoming documentary Birthright). She has published in such journals as Theatre Journal, Wide Angle, and Yale Journal of Law. Her latest book, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene, was published by Duke University Press.

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