Palestine’s leading female filmmaker, Annemarie Jacir has written, directed and produced over sixteen films. Two of her films have premiered as Official Selections in Cannes, one in Berlin and in Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam, Toronto and Telluride. All three of her feature films were selected as Palestine’s Oscar Entry for Foreign Language Film. Her short film Like Twenty Impossibles (2003) was the first Arab short film in history to be an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival and continued to break ground when it went on to be a finalist for the Academy Awards. Jacir became an APSA Academy Member in 2013 with the nomination of When I Saw You (Lamma Shoftak) for Best Children’s Feature Film. In 2015, her treatment for Wajib secured an MPA APSA Academy Film Fund grant for script development. Premiering in 2017, Wajib won 36 international awards including Best Film in Mar Del Plata, Dubai, Amiens, DC Film Festival and Kerala Film Festivals and received a jury mention at the London BFI Festival. Actors Mohamed and Saleh Bakri were was nominated for the APSA Best Performance by an Actor for theirhis roles.
The Asia Pacific Screen Academy expresses its respect for and acknowledgement of the South East Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. We pay our respects to the Traditional Owners of country, including the custodial communities on whose land works are created and celebrated by the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. We acknowledge the continuing connection to land, waters and communities. We also pay our respects to Elders, past and emerging. We recognise the integral role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and First Nations peoples continue to play in storytelling and celebration spaces.
