Jury & Awards

Asad Kirmani is a Writer/Director and a practicing psychiatrist in Austin, TX. While in medical school he produced and directed All the Wrong Reasons, a full-length comedy feature about a hapless young medical student. While doing his psychiatric residency in New York City he produced and directed Curing Gender, a documentary about the history of psychiatry and transsexuality that has been used educationally by a number of hospitals and institutions across the country, and was

shown at the 2013 American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

He has written and directed three short films, Stress Freud, Pornistan, and Hijabi. Pornistan won the 2013 Flatland Film Festival Chris Caddel Filmmaker Award and was a Finalist for Best Comedy Short at the 2014 Central Florida Film Festival. Hijabi premiered at the Brooklyn Short Film Festival in 2017. It was distributed through the online streaming service Seed&Spark, where it was featured on their “Must-See” list. He is currently in post-production on his fourth short film,

How to Wash the Dead.

Fate exerts a powerful pull on our lives. As Greg Davis knows, it can drag you through the mud before it shows you the light at the end of the tunnel. For Davis, fate is his quest for meaning, his desire to connect his experiences with those of people worlds apart. Born and raised in a small East Texas town, After 10 years in the tech sector, he quit his job and went on a yearlong global soul-searching expedition. 

Greg, who is represented by National Geographic Image Collection, worked his way from local festivals to international exhibitions. His first major solo exhibit for the Museum of the Southwest followed the stories of individual pilgrims to the 2013 Kumbh Mela, the largest religious pilgrimage in history, about which he also completed his first short documentary film, Cloth Paper Dreams. That led to a follow up film,“The Man From Mathura”, that is currently in production.

Leng Wong is a producer and artist based in Austin, TX.  As a producer, she has produced over 50 productions and events including theater, film, festivals, and community events, since 2012.  Her latest project was producing the People of Color Comedy Festival (PoCCF), the first of its kind in Texas, in 2019.  Leng was also the executive producer for the Austin Asian American Film Festival (AAAFF) who successfully brought the festival back in 2014. 

She is the founder of Lucky Chaos, a nonprofit arts organization whose mission is to produce works by artists from under-represented communities, with emphasis on personal stories.  “Being an artist is about putting your soul out there, in spite of all the fears and doubts because it’s those fears and doubts that make us human and compel us to create.”