Festival Award Jurors judge the best films entered into competition and choose the top film in each category along with a Grand Jury Award winner.

Beth Accomando, Film Critic
Beth Accomando has been the KPBS film critic for twenty years, winning more than a dozen awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and San Diego Press Club for her radio and web reviews and interviews. She curates the annual Film School Confidential: A Showcase of San Diego and Tijuana Filmmakers, and has served on the film selection committee for the the San Diego Latino Film Festival. She also was the international film programmer for the San Diego Asian Film Festival's inaugural year. She has curated a Hong Kong film series at the Museum of Photographic Arts, and runs an Anime and Manga Club at a local middle school. She is currently the president of the San Diego Film Critics Society. When she was at Fox 6, she won 11 Southwestern area Emmy Awards as well a Pro Max and Telly Award for her on air promotions work. Beth freelances for National Public Radio and Public Radio International, specializing in international cinema. Beth is also an Asian action film junkie, and thinks Chow Yun Fat is a god.

Rose Kuo, Artistic Director, American Film Institute
Rose Kuo has worked both in film festival programming as well as film production. As a programmer, Kuo worked for Santa Barbara and Mill Valley festivals, and also served as a consultant for the San Francisco International Film Festival and LACMA Film Screening. She possesses an extensive background as a filmmaker, working as an assistant to Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker and as a camera assistant to famed cinematographer Haskel Wexler. Among a myriad of feature flm credits spanning over twenty years, Kuo has also worked with such top directors as Michael Mann, Paul Schrader, Ed Zwick and Martin Scorsese. Well versed in both intrnational and American cinema, Rose has worked on several independent films, as post-production supervisor on Maggie Greenwald's "The Killoff" and as executive producer on Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's "The Fluffer."

Ham Tran, Filmmaker
Born in Vietnam, the youngest of first generation ethnic Chinese Vietnamese parents, Tran immigrated to America in 1982 as a refugee. A product of assimilation, Tran graduated from UCLA with a BA in English Literature, through what he considers a process of institutionalized amnesia. His works in poetry, prose, playwriting, and film are a reflection of his process to regain lost memories. His first two short films, "The Prescription" (1999) and "Pomegranate" (2000) were both semi-finalists for the Student Academy Awards. Tran graduated with an MFA from the UCLA School of Film and Television. His thesis film, "The Anniversary" (2003) won over 30 international film festival awards, including SDAFF's Best Dramatic Narrative Short Award, and was short-listed as Best Live Action Short for the 2004 Academy Awards. His first feature film, "Journey From the Fall" (2006), was widely received by critics when it was released theatrically in 2007. "Journey From the Fall" has won over 16 international awards, and is currently available on DVD.

Tran is currently working on his next feature film, "Distant Country," based on the outrageously true story of two Vietnamese illegal immigrants whose dreams of reaching the United States took them on a journey around the world.

Chi-Hui Yang, Director, San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival
Chi-hui Yang is the director and programmer of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF), a presentation of the Center for Asian American Media. In its 26th year, the SFIAAFF is the nation's largest showcase for Asian American and Asian cinema. As a guest curator, Yang has presented film and video series at film festivals internationally, including the Seattle International Film Festival, Washington D.C. International Film Festival and Barcelona Asian Film Festival. He also contributes writing on politics and culture to various print and online publications and lectures on Asian American cinema. He has also served on funding panels for Creative Capital, Rockefeller Foundation, ITVS and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Jeff Yang
Jeff Yang is "Asian Pop" columnist for the digital edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. His career as a journalist and cultural critic has spanned over a decade and a half, beginning with a position as feature writer, culture critic and columnist for Manhattan's legendary alternative newsweekly, the Village Voice. His writing appears in publications such as Vibe, Spin, Life, Salon.com and the Washington Post, and he serves as a cultural correspondent for WNYC, NPR's flagship station in New York. He was the founder of aMagazine: Inside Asian America, which over the course of ten years grew into Asian America's largest and most influential English-language media institution, and he has authored several bestselling books, including Eastern Standard Time: A Guide to Asian Influence in American Culture (Houghton Mifflin); I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action (Ballantine Books), the international action hero's official autobiography; Once Upon a Time in China (Atria/Pocket Books); and the forthcoming Asian American supehero comics anthology, Secret Identities, which will be published by The New Press in Spring 2009.

[ See the 2007 SDAFF Jurors ]