Screening Committee
For the 2020 award, 25 excellent films were submitted for consideration which we believe bodes well for the future of documentary filmmaking about Japan.
Thanks to everyone who volunteered to screen films for the 2020 Award.
Clark Chilson
Brian Deutsch
Jonathan Devine
Brenda Jordan
Christopher Kraemer
Stephen Luft
Gabriella Lukacs
Hiroshi Nara
Elizabeth Oyler
Jordan Parrish
Andrea Radziminski
Kay Shimizu
Seung-hwan Shin
Devon Tipp
Marisol Villela Balderrama
Michael Walter
Yoshihiro Yasuhara
Planning Committee
Clark Chilson, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Charles Exley, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Elizabeth Oyler, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Kay Shimizu, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Kirsten Strayer, SCREENSHOT:ASIA Programming Coordinator
Advisory Judges
Robert Clift, Ph.D. is a documentary filmmaker and associate professor in Film and Media Studies at Pitt. His films include Stealing Home: The Case of Contemporary Cuban Baseball (PBS, 2001), Blacking Up: Hip-Hop’s Remix of Race and Identity (PBS, 2010), and Road Comics: Big Work on Small Stages (PBS, 2012) which played at more than a dozen festivals and conferences. His latest film, Making Montgomery Clift (with Hillary Demmond), was screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Clift’s writing has been featured in the anthology Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice and Spectatorship (Routledge, 2013).
Kazuhiro Soda is an award-winning filmmaker known for his observational method of documentary filmmaking. His Campaign (2007) won the Peabody Award in the U.S. Mental (2008) won the Best Documentary Award at the Busan International Film Festival and the Dubai International Film Festival. Soda’s recent films include Inland Sea (2018), which was invited to the Berlinale, and The Big House (2018), which was released in June 2018. His new film, Zero, opened at the Moma and screened in competition at the Berlinale. Soda is also the author of seven books published in Japan. He taught at the University of Michigan as a visiting professor from 2016 till 2017.