Rakhee Morzaria
Comedian, Actor, Writer

Rakhee Morzaria is a multi-award-nominated South-Asian actor, writer, and comedian. She was the lead on the hit Hulu/CBC comedy, Run the Burbs and her filmmaking has been showcased at the Atlantic Film Festival, Imagine This Film festival in New York, Kevin Hart’s Eat My Shorts Competition. Her CBC digital series, Note to Self, was nominated for a Canadian Screen and Canadian Comedy Award. As seen on What We Do in the Shadows (FX), Private Eyes (CTV) and My Spy (Netflix), and animated series Summer Memories (Roku), Rakhee also performs stand-up and sketch and performed at the Toronto and Montreal Sketchfest, Comedy is Art Festival, the Second City Stage and as part of inaugural Bob Curry Fellowship program.

Meelad Moaphi
Filmmaker

Meelad Moaphi is an Iranian Canadian filmmaker and Assistant Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. His debut feature, His Father’s Son, won the Audience Choice and Best Director prizes at the 2024 Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and is now available on Apple TV+.

Eman Pathan
Producer

Eman Pathan produces work that focuses on diasporic narratives, with themes of identity, belonging and home. The Reelworld Producer Program alumni and DGC member produced Jersey Boy, a coming-of-age feature film about a Sikh boy struggling with his identity in the aftermath of 9/11.

Yung Chang
Filmmaker

Award-winning filmmaker Yung Chang (Up the Yangtze, Wuhan Wuhan) explores stories bridging East and West. He recently completed production of his short fiction The Highway (2025) and is developing his debut narrative fiction feature, Eggplant. Chang is a member of AMPAS, DGC and WGC.

Shasha Nakhai
Filmmaker

Shasha is a Toronto-based storyteller with over a decade of experience in scripted and unscripted. Her work has aired on the BBC, CBC, ZDF, and Arte; screened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); been nominated for 16 Canadian Screen Awards; named TIFF’s Top 10; and shortlisted for an Oscar.

Alison Almeida
Producer

Alison Almeida is a South Asian producer based in Toronto.

Jialan Lin
Writer & Director

Jialan Lin is a Toronto-based Chinese writer-director whose work delves into the cultural and societal systems that reinforce inequality, intending to spark dialogue and foster healing. A graduate of the USC Film School (MFA) and a participant of the Whistler Film Festival Screenwriters lab, she is currently developing her debut feature, Caregiver.

Katharine King So
Filmmaker

Katharine King So’s work often explores being a gay half-Asian woman: whether she’s playing one onscreen (Revival, The Voyeurs), developing dark-comedy scripts (TIFF’s Series Accelerator, Inside Out’s Finance Forum), or walking her dog in a Melissa Etheridge t-shirt. She is repped by PLAY Mgmt. www.katharinekingso.com @katharinekingso

Dylan Pun
Director

Dylan is a Chinese film director whose style revolves around strong talent direction, meticulously crafted frames, and an edit-conscious approach. He is drawn to character-driven stories that call for a unique visual language. His short film Shrimp Fried Rice won Best Screenplay at the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Lee Nisar
Filmmaker, Writer, & Photographer

Lee Nisar is a Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker, writer, and photographer based out of Toronto, Canada. Lee’s work explores issues relating to intergenerational curses, queerness, and the absurd. When not working on their next film, Lee enjoys karaoke, trying out new recipes, and annoying their cat.

Lizzie Han
Filmmaker

Lizzie Han is a Korean-Canadian filmmaker based in Toronto. She is drawn to restrained studies of daily life that balance dry humour with quiet tragedy. Her work has screened at numerous international film festivals including NFFTY, TIFF Next Wave, and Phoenix Film Festival.

Yvette Sin
Filmmaker

Yvette Sin is a queer Canadian-Hong Kongese artist based in Toronto. From found objects, intrusive thoughts, inside jokes and gossip, she makes: collages, poems, mistakes and moving pictures. Mostly she spends her days at a bookstore in the west end, slingin’ books, driving around the city and scheming.

Kid Koala

Kid Koala is a Montreal-based scratch DJ, film composer, theatre producer and visual artist. He has released 5 solo albums, and contributed to several feature film soundtracks including The Great Gatsby, Looper, Baby Driver and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. He has toured with the likes of Radiohead, Deltron 3030 and The Preservation Hall Jazz Band. He has written and illustrated the award-winning graphic novels Nufonia Must Fall and Space Cadet. He is known for his imaginative live productions such as Vinyl Vaudeville, Satellite Turntable Orchestra, and The Storyville Mosquito, each of which expresses his unique form of storytelling with music, animation, film and interactive entertainment.

Lalita Krishna
Documentary Filmmaker

Lalita Krishna is a critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker whose films have screened on all major networks, and won awards at major film festivals around the world.  Lalita is also the winner of the 2021 Hot Docs Don Haig award, the 2013 Crystal Award for mentorship given by WIFT(Women in Film and Television), the Trailblazer (2012) award given by the Reel World Film Festival and the Dream Catcher award from the Hope and Dreams Festival NJ, for using her craft to better humanity.

Yasmine Mathurin
Writer and Director

Yasmine Mathurin is a Haitian-Canadian award-winning writer & director. Her first feature documentary film ONE OF OURS premiered at Hot Docs in 2021 and won the Special Jury Prize and top 10 Audience choice and was nominated for 3 Canadian Screen Awards for best writing, best directing and best feature documentary. It is now available on CBC Gem and in the US through AMC+ and Sundance TV. She previously worked as an associate producer with CBC Original Podcast where her work has been awarded with a Webby people’s choice and a Canadian Digital Publishing Award.

She is an alumni of the Hot Docs Documentary Lab, RIDM lab, the Union Docs Feature documentary lab, the Berlinale Doc Toolbox program, DOC Breakthrough, TIFF CHANEL Women’s Writers Network, TIFF Writers Studio. Her work has been screened at several film festivals including, DocEdge, Hot Docs, RIDM and DOC NYC and Indie Memphis Film festival.

She recently produced and directed episodes in the CBC documentary series FOR THE CULTURE WITH AMANADA PARRIS. She is currently 1 of 8 directors selected in the 2023/2024 Women In the Director’s Chair Story & Leadership program. She is the recipient of the 2023 TIFF CBC Screenwriter Award for her upcoming fiction narrative feature film SORRY PARDON MADAME.

Shasha Nakhai
Filmmaker

Shasha Nakhai is a storyteller whose work has taken her to the Hawaiian coastline, the ski slopes of Davos, the Nevada desert, a Cold War bunker, the engine room of a decaying ship, Philippine sugar mills and the front lines of Nigeria’s energy crisis. Her work has aired on the BBC, CBC, ZDF, and Arte; screened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); been nominated for 16 Canadian Screen Awards; named TIFF’s Top 10; and shortlisted for an Oscar.

With over a decade of experience in documentary, Shasha recently released her first drama feature with partner Rich Williamson – Scarborough, adapted from the award-winning novel by Catherine Hernandez. The film made its World Premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the Shawn Mendes Foundation Changemaker Award, was 1st runner up for People’s Choice, and received an Honourable Mention for Best Canadian Feature.

Shasha is an alumna of TMU’s Journalism Program, Berlinale Toolbox, the DOC Institute’s Breakthrough Program, Hot Docs Doc Accelerator, WIFT’s Ubisoft Toronto Mentorship, the Reel Asian First Feature Lab, and TIFF’s Talent Accelerator.

Soko Negash
Producer

Soko Negash is a Toronto-based producer dabbling in doc, scripted, podcasts, and lots in between. Some things she’s proud of: working on all four seasons of Netflix’s Emmy-winning Hip-Hop Evolution (Banger Films), production managing two barrier-breaking CBC Gem web series (Next Stop & Lido TV), and producing a doc series about viral videos (Witness with Scarborough Pictures) which premiered at Hot Docs and Doc NYC. She is currently in post-production on two feature films due to surface in late 2024 – Reza Dahya’s highly-anticipated Talent To Watch film Boxcutter, and award-winning director Amar Wala’s Shook. Soko is also an alumni of the Netflix/Hot Docs’ Doc Accelerator program, Black Screen Office Producer’s Program, Black Women Film! Canada, and RealScreen’s Pathways Mentorship program. Soko is a graduate of TMU’s School of Media, and of the multi-city arts incubator, The Remix Project.

Kid Koala
Director

Kid Koala is a Montreal-based scratch DJ, film composer, theatre producer and visual artist. He has released 5 solo albums, and contributed to several feature film soundtracks. He is known for his imaginative live productions, each of which expresses his unique form of storytelling with music, animation, film and interactive entertainment.

Lillian Chan
Head of Story and Production Designer

Lillian Chan is an experienced animation filmmaker known for her work on various projects, including the award-winning children’s film Jaime Lo, Small and Shy (NFB, 2007), an educational short for TEDed, and a VR prototype for the CFC Medialab. Her commercial clients include DisneyXD, Nelvana, Guru Studios, and Mozilla. Lillian serves as professor of animation at Seneca Polytechnic in Toronto.

Corinne Merrell
Artistic Director

Corinne Merrell creates work as an art director for film, stop-motion animation and theatre. Credits include stop-motion art director on the animated feature The Little Prince, as well as production designer on the National Film Board’s The Fruit Hunters. Ongoing works with Kid Koala includeThe Storyville Mosquito and Nufonia Must Fall. Space Cadet is her first CG animated project.

Saffron Maeve
Critic, Curator

Saffron Maeve is a Toronto-based critic and curator. Her writing has appeared in Film Comment, The Globe & Mail, Sight and Sound, MUBI Notebook, Reverse Shot, Cinema Scope, Hyperallergic, Toronto Star, and Screen Slate. She is the curator of CONTOURS at Paradise Theatre, a monthly series of films which thematize visual art. Saffron is an active member of the Toronto Film Critics Association and GALECA: the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, as well as a past guest speaker and moderator for TIFF, International Film Festival of Ottawa, Dave Barber Cinematheque, Wavelengths, and Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.

Iris Ng
Cinematographer (THE LAST OF THE SEA WOMEN)

Iris is a cinematographer known for work that focuses on human rights, marginalised perspectives, and POV filmmaking. She has extensive experience in documentary films but has also been lensing films for contemporary artists, as well as shot scripted shorts, prime time TV, and digital series. Her most notable work includes Stories We Tell, Shirkers, and celebrated socially-critical feature documentaries such as Twice Colonized, One Of Ours, Subjects Of Desire, A Better Man, Migrant Dreams, and most recently Exclusion: Beyond The Silence, and The Last Of The Sea Women.

Ila Firouzabadi
Screenwriter (UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE)

Born in 1980 in Tehran and based in Montreal since 2012, Ila Firouzabadi is an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on ambiguous and sensitive forms through drawings and a combination sculpture and installation. Firouzabadi received a BA in graphic design in 2005 from Azad University of Art and Architecture in Tehran and graduated from École national des arts décoratifs de Strasbourg in 2009.  She has exhibited her work around the world, notably at Keramikmuseum and the Artforum Kunstlerkreis Ortenau Gallery (Germany,2009), the Espace Apollonia (France, 2010), at the Theodore Deck museum (France, 2010), at OBORO (Quebec,2013), at MAI (Quebec,2015) and at Etemad gallery (Iran,2016). In Canada, Firouzabadi’s practice has expanded into moving images in two collaborative projects with director Matthew Rankin; an Esperanto-language docu-fiction project presently in production, Kongreso, and the fiction film of Universal Language (2024) which premiered at the 55th Directors Fortnight in Cannes.

Andrew Phung
Actor, Host, and Comedian

Andrew Phung is an award-winning actor, host, and comedian, known for the comedy series Kim’s Convenience. He won five Canadian Screen Awards as Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for that role. He’s currently the co-creator and star of the comedy series Run the Burbs on Hulu/CBC.

Amanda De Souza
Director/Producer

Amanda de Souza is a Canadian Director/Producer with a career spanning over 15 years in the entertainment industry including Advertising in Toronto, PR for Broadway theatre and design for W Magazine in NYC, and film marketing/distribution in LA. Her contributions as an Assistant to Directors, Producers and Showrunners in Canada includes series and feature films with Netflix, Disney, Lionsgate and Universal with extensive experience in every step of filmmaking from the writers’ room to post-production. She is currently a Producer for Apartment 3C Productions in Los Angeles, under founder and Director/Actress Jennifer Morrison.

Meelad Moaphi
Filmmaker

Meelad Moaphi is a Toronto-based filmmaker. Born in Iran, Meelad spent most of his childhood in Japan and has also worked in Spain. In 2024, he completed his directorial feature debut, entitled His Father’s Son. Meelad was Associate Producer on Antoine Bourges’ feature Concrete Valley, which screened at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and the 2023 Berlinale. Meelad’s short film credits include Arrhythmia (2009), Republic of God (2010), A Scene (2018), and Worth (2019). He is also an Assistant Professor at Wilfrid-Laurier University’s Department of English and Film Studies.

Sami Khan
Filmmaker

Fateema Al-Hamaydeh Miller
Filmmaker

Fateema Al-Hamaydeh Miller is a mixed-race Palestinian filmmaker whose work explores fragmented identity, grief & post-traumatic growth through “oh no, should I laugh?” comedy. Fateema is a WIDC and CFC Directors’ Lab alumni and recently completed a fellowship for Middle Eastern writers at USC. She is a firm believer in resistance through laughter.

Priscilla Galvez
Filmmaker

Priscilla Galvez is a Toronto-based director, producer and co-founder of the production company Silent Tower. Her latest short film ‘A Fermenting Woman’ world premiered at REGARD Festival and was recently awarded Programmer’s Choice at Minikino Film Festival.

Oshini Wanigasekera
Director, Producer, & Animator

Oshini Wanigasekera is a Toronto based actor, animator, dancer, and filmmaker. She wrote and directed the award-winning film, What I Meant To Say, I Can’t Do This Anymore, and a solo stage show. Her television appearances include The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu), Titans (HBO), Workin‘ Moms (CBC), and Good Sam (CBS). She has animated for Disney and Netflix series, video games, short films and feature films.

Ella Saini
Director & Animator

Ella Saini (she/they) is a Filipino-Indian Canadian filmmaker based in Scarborough, ON. She captures the intricate connections between people and their environments, highlighting the often overlooked narratives within urban communities. Their current short unhome has been screened at F-O-R-M Festival of Recorded Movement and 2024 TIFF Next Wave.

Chen Sing Yap
Director & Editor

Chen Sing Yap (he/him) is a Singaporean-born GTA-based editor, director, and writer. His work often leans into stark juxtapositions and graphic matches to bring mental health issues to light. He is the director and editor of Feeling the Apocalypse, a climate anxiety documentary that has played over a hundred venues.

Weiye Su
Director, Producer, & Writer

Weiye Su is a Canadian-Chinese documentarian and photographic artist. Weiye’s dedication to storytelling and capturing personal narratives within cultural contexts shines through their films, including Jia (2020), A Passage Beyond Fortune (2022), offering nuanced insights into the ever-evolving values of our society.

Jenny 진희 Lee
Director & Writer

Jenny 진희 Lee is a Korean Canadian TV writer and filmmaker. She was most recently co-producer and writer on Murdock Mysteries (CBC). Jenny likes to create character-driven works that examine family, society, and mental well-being and madness – all from a perspective grounded in the experiences of women.

Natalie Murao
Director, Producer, & Writer

Natalie is a yonsei (fourth generation) Japanese Canadian filmmaker and educator based in “Vancouver”. She aims to expand the notion of Asian diasporic cinema by creating an in-betweenness of styles that embody the diaspora itself. Her films have played at Sundance, TIFF Next Wave, Palm Springs ShortFest and more. In tandem with filmmaking, she has facilitated educational programs for local institutes such as The Cinematheque and VIFF.

Ann Marie Fleming
Filmmaker

Ann Marie Fleming was born in Okinawa and is now based in Vancouver. Her body of work as a filmmaker includes fiction, documentary, and animation. She’s directed short films including You Take Care Now (1990) and Blue Skies (2002), and features such as The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam (2003) and Window Horses (2016). Can I Get a Witness? (2024) is her latest film.

Winnie Wang
Writer, Film Programmer

Winnie Wang is a writer and film programmer. Their work can be found in Cinema Scope, Documentary Magazine, POV and Toronto Star.

Amar Wala
Filmmaker

Amar is a Mumbai born, Toronto based filmmaker whose works include his first feature documentary The Secret Trial 5, which received a Jury Prize at Hot Docs and was named one the Best Docs of the Decade by Real Screen Magazine, and Shook, his scripted feature debut which premiered at TIFF in 2024. His body of deeply human and richly visual work has led to a CSA nomination, and the prestigious Vanguard Award from the DOC Institute. Amar has also produced and directed numerous acclaimed series for CBC, Vice, and Bell Media among others, his latest being the CBC doc series Witness (Hot Docs, Doc NYC ‘23), which he also created. Amar is also the founder of Scarborough Pictures, an award-winning production company based in Toronto.

Kalaisan Kalaichelvan
Composer

Named as one Playback’s 10 to Watch, Kalaisan’s compositional practice spans multiple disciplines, drawing from film, dance, theatre, installation and deals with themes of translation and transference. He was a 2021 Fellow of the prestigious Sundance Composers lab and an alumna of the Canadian Film Centre as one of the 2021 Slaight Music residents. Kalaisan has scored films that have premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, TIFF and AFI FIlm Festival. He is currently working on various commissions and scoring a new Netflix series directed by Simon Barry.

Adnan Khan
Co-Screenwriter

Adnan Khan is a screenwriter, novelist, and journalist. His debut novel, There Has to Be a Knife, was named a best Canadian novel of 2019 by the CBC. His second, The Hypebeast, will be published spring 2025. He was the recipient of the 2022 National Magazine Award for best profile, and has taught screenwriting at the University of Guelph. His first feature film, Shook, premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.