2021 Jury Members — Asian World Film Festival

With 45+ years of experience in the film industry, Sydney Levine is currently a trainer/educator and consultant with producers planning festival and sales and financing strategies, and with film commissions interested in bringing U.S. producers and production companies to their locations for filming co-productions. She began her career as the first woman in international distribution in 1975 at 20th Century Fox International. Moving into acquisitions at Lorimar Pictures and Republic Pictures in the 80s, she created the industry’s first database, designed for acquisitions executives and festival programmers tracking new films worldwide. Her partnership with the Cannes Market led to Cinando. In 2007 her company FilmFinders was acquired by IMDb. Since leaving she established SydneysBuzz, a blog about the international film business. She continues teaching, currently at the Munich Film and TV School, and to work with German Film Commissions and German Film promotion, moderating panels, interviewing filmmakers, serving on juries, and consulting with filmmakers. She lives in Los Angeles and Berlin and travels extensively on the international film circuit and speaks English, French, German and Spanish.

Sydney Levine (President)

Cheng-Sim Lim is an independent film curator and delegate for the San Sebastian International Film Festival. She has served as Artistic Director of the multi-city China Onscreen | Biennial (COB) headquartered at UCLA, Co-Head of Programming at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and guest curated for museums and film festivals. Her work has helped to build audiences and appreciation in the United States for filmmakers from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Retrospectives she has curated have toured North America and Europe to critical acclaim. Lim's own video works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, among others.

Ms. Cheng-Sim Lim

Arati brings 20 years of experience in the Entertainment, Tech, Education & lifestyle business from a global perspective. Her expertise includes Feature Films, TV, Culinary, Wine product sales, and Startups. She thrives on recognizing and prioritizing short and long-term goals to greenlight a show or scale a business from a holistic approach and is passionate about developing a good story with writers and envisioning characters who bring authenticity to voice. Arati’s love of entertainment is producing, from script to screen or stream. Her experience in foreign and domestic sales allows her to have the mindset of a businesswoman while having a strong sensitivity to good storytelling. She thrives on leadership and self-development to do and be better. Her experience chairing Women in Film International has allowed her to home in on her passion for mentoring and giving voice to countless women worldwide who strive to pursue their goals. Chairing is one of her most meaningful accomplishments and she has programmed and produced multiple events for the Los Angeles film community and been recognized by President Obama.

Ms. Arati Misro

Ivana Nguyen is an American producer and actress. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she studied journalism before making the transition to work in the film industry. Throughout college, she interned at ABC 7, Entertainment Tonight, CNN, and HLN. Nguyen earned her B.A. in Communications with an emphasis in broadcast journalism and minor in radio-TV-film and M.S. in journalism from the University of Southern California.
Nguyen currently oversees Ole Entertainment and is an executive producer and actress in the movie Night Walk (2021), starring Sean Stone, Mickey Rourke, and Eric Roberts.

Ms. Ivana Nguyen

Amdrzej Bartkowiak is an esteemed cinematographer, known for his long-term association with director Sidney Lumet. He trained at the Polish Film School in his native Lódz and after emigrating to the U.S.A. he began working in commercials, filming hundreds of memorable spots for IBM, Xerox, American Express, Pepsi, Coca Cola, Chrysler revival with Lee Iacocca, Toyota, and many more. Andrzej's breakthrough film was his work on the gritty urban thriller Prince of the City, his first collaboration with Sidney Lumet and he worked on the director's next 11 films over the following 12 years. Bartkowiak became much in demand after his taut camera work in Speed and has worked for Barbra Streisand three times on her Broadway Album video, Nuts and The Mirror Has Two Faces. Other directors that Bartkowiak has collaborated with include James Ivory, John Huston, Tony Scott, William Friedkin, James Brooks, Ivan Reitman, Jan de Bont, Dick Donner, and Taylor Hackford. His directorial debut, with the help of producer Joel Silver, was Romeo Must Die.

Mr. Andrzej Bartkoviak

Lianne Hu is the Managing Director of Hus Entertainment, a multimedia production company based in Shanghai, China, and Los Angeles, California, USA. It specializes in developing, producing, and ﬁnancing heartfelt projects with an international appeal. Lianne is a member of SAG-AFTRA in the US, a member of the Advisory Board at the Asian World Film Festival, and a member of the Executive Committee at the Chinese American Film Festival. She has a Masters of Business Administration from Pepperdine University in California.

Lianne is a producer, writer, and actor, with credits in the US and China. Raised in Shanghai, in a theatrical family, Lianne began her professional acting career at a very young age. Upon her arrival in Hollywood, she appeared in several ﬁlms, including the ground-breaking lead role in the ﬁlm Now Chinatown, which earned her rave reviews from critics and audiences, and won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Choice Awards of Best Picture at the New York International Independent Film Festival. Combining her rich experience in business development, corporate management, and her diversiﬁed cultural background, Lianne is a ﬁlmmaker known for developing projects with cross-cultural themes that are commercially viable and socially inﬂuential. She produced the political drama Shanghai 1976 starring Jean-Hugues Anglade; an award-winning Tibetan period drama Prince of the Himalayas, which is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; and Lord of Shanghai, an epic gangster drama which takes place in the risk-takers paradise, Shanghai in the early 1900s, which was chosen as the Closing Film at the 19th Shanghai International Film Festival. Her most recent release is the award-winning ﬁlm Concubine of Shanghai, a sequel to Lord of Shanghai.

Ms. Lianne Hu

Peter Luo is the founder and CEO of Starlight Media, a multifaceted entertainment company and industry-leading proponent of multicultural representation and diversity. A graduate of the prestigious Directing Program of Beijing Film Academy, Peter has been involved in film and television productions for decades.
Peter takes a transmedia approach to developing IP and collaborating with content creators around the world, and his ability to foster relationships with top creative talent has led to deals with A-list filmmakers such as Robert Zemeckis, Sam Raimi, Sylvester Stallone, James Wan, F. Gary Gray, Roland Emmerich, Jon M. Chu, Alan Taylor, Jonathan Liebesman, Nattawut Poonpiriya and Bryan Singer, whose collective global box office earnings eclipse $30 billion.

Since launching Starlight Media in 2013, Peter has been involved in the production and financing of a wide range of critically and commercially successful films including Oscar® nominated Marshall, directed by Reginald Hudlin and starring Chadwick Boesman; John Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians, a global hit that proved films with a predominantly Asian cast can achieve massive box office success; the sci/fi horror hit Greta, directed by Neil Jordan and starring Chloe Grace Moretz; Midway, the WWII action/drama starring Woody Harrelson, Patrick Wilson, Dennis Quaid, Mandy Moore, and Luke Evans; and the horror/mystery/thriller Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark from Guillermo del Toro.

In 2020, Peter launched Stars Collective, an initiative to support emerging filmmakers in diversity, with 140 filmmakers from all over the world and 15 mentors including Sam Raimi, Donna Gigliotti, Gianni Nunnari, Chris Lee, Sanping Han, Patrick Wachsberger, Eric Heumann, Liming Ke, Alan Taylor, Xiaoming Huang, Rob Minkoff, Paula Wagner, Anthony McCarten, Jon M. Chu, and Jonathan Liebesman.

Peter Luo

Actress, best-selling author, activist, wife, mother, and grandmother, Loni Anderson is best known for her groundbreaking role as the “sexy-yet-smartest-person-in-the-room receptionist”, Jennifer Marlowe on the hit series, WKRP In Cincinnati, for which she received multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.

Over the subsequent three and a half decades Loni went on to star in five additional television series, seven feature films, eighteen television movies, and two mini-series, along with scores of starring roles in television series and specials, plus a joyful and welcome return to her first love, musical theater. She also wrote and published the NYT bestselling autobiography, My Life In High Heels. Her latest venture is the second season of the hilarious series, My Sister Is So Gay, now streaming on Amazon Prime.

With a degree in Art Education from the University of Minnesota, Loni’s original ambition after graduation was to become an animator. After discovering that her talents were not to the level required to bring her success in this field, she began lending her voice to animated characters instead. Always having been an avid art collector and supporter of up-and-coming painters and sculptors, she currently sits on the board of Winn/Slavin Fine Art and is an associate curator at their two Beverly Hills gallery locations.

Ms. Anderson has shown a passionate lifetime commitment to raising COPD awareness with the National Lung Health Education Program, and also gives her time and commitment to The Race to Erase MS, the American Cancer Society, and Us Against Alzheimer’s.

Ms. Loni Anderson