Singapore Youth Film Festival 2027
Singapore Youth Film Festival (SYFF) 2027 Nominees are out! Save the date: Catch SYFF nominated films on the big screen from 11 to 26 February 2027!
Check out all the nominated films from the Student and Open Youth Category!
Film Facilitation Collective 2026 - RUSHES 02: THE WRAP RACE
Local creative production collective AMOK is back with Film Facilitation Collective for a second edition of their intimately chaotic party series, RUSHES! Find out more now!
Film Facilitation Collective 2026 - PITCH AND PANEL
Catch the FFC Open Pitch as emerging filmmakers bring their projects to the stage, followed by the SEA Directors Roundtable, where directors from Southeast Asia come together to chat about their experiences, creative journeys and the filmmaking landscape!
Open Youth Category
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Student Category
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MOST PROMISING AWARD
Sophia Wu is an 18-year-old soon-graduating student from Raffles institution who makes films with whatever she can get her hands on, seeking to push the limits of what she can do in the medium.
After falling in love with film and gaining a foundation in filmmaking and storytelling through her school's film courses, she went on to win awards in Objectifs' Student Visual Storytelling Awards, and produce an official alunch video for her school's edible garden.
She seeks to evoke the inexplicable yet tender emotions we experience through her works, exploring the facets of human emotion and connection. Each film is an attempt to understand and process the temporal nature of everything in our world, and to preserve a moment's fleeting thought or feeling. Sophia has a knack for finding beauty in the often ignored, posessing an urge to tell honest stories through her whimsical, almost painted and surreal visual style with open framing and striking colors.
As a young filmmaker, she is excited to see what she can do with filmmaking to impact the community and grow in her own style. Sophia believes in the power of film to resonate with the individual and inspire change for a better world.
Sophia Wu
Selection Committee
Christine Seow
Selection Committee (Student Category)
Christine Seow is a Singaporean filmmaker currently based in London, and alumni of the National Film and Television School. Her short film Two Travelling Aunties (2025) was nominated for the prestigious IDA Documentary Award and Beyond These Walls (2024), was nominated for a Grierson Award. She is drawn to stories that explore identity and belonging.
Rachel Liew
Selection Committee (Student Category)
Born and raised in Singapore, Rachel comes from a background in media and advertising. Her interest in film led her to pursue cinematography and a career in the industry, where she continues to explore the possibilities of visual storytelling across shorts, features and commercials.
Having worked extensively across both analog and digital formats, Rachel is constantly exploring new ways to approach and shape a story through the image. Her work has screened internationally at festivals including Sundance, Busan International Film Festival, SXSW, ZINEBI and Clermont-Ferrand, among others.
As one of the few female cinematographers in Singapore, Rachel’s university graduation short film HAN was awarded the Laszlo Kovacs Golden Tadpole in the Student Etude Competition at Camerimage, the international festival dedicated to the art of cinematography, in 2016. She later went on to pursue a Masters in Cinematography at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in the U.K.
Based in Singapore and working internationally, Rachel is drawn to projects wherever they may take her. She hopes to continue collaborating with filmmakers across cultures and borders, lending her voice to stories that challenge, connect and inspire.
Don Aravind
Selection Committee (Student Category)
Don Aravind is a Singapore-based filmmaker and director working across film, television, and digital storytelling for over a decade. His work has screened at local and international film festivals, including theSingapore International Film Festival. In 2015, he was part of the pioneer directing team behind Tanglin, Singapore’s first English daily long-form drama, directing over 120 episodes. In 2025, he was one of the directors for Kopitiam Days, an SG60 film initiative. Beyond directing, Don actively teaches and mentors youth and emerging filmmakers.
Sasha Han
Selection Committee (Student Category)
Sasha Han seeks to reify the fugitive effects of looking through language. Broadly, she is interested in the circulation of images in Southeast Asia and its potential for resistance. Her writing has been published by the Asian Film Archive, Documentary Magazine, Film Comment, Literary Hub, Mekong Review and the Singapore Film Society. She has curated film programmes at Festival Film Dokumenter and Queer East. In 2025, she co-founded CORRESPONDENCE, a film publication based in Singapore.
Armiliah Aripin
Selection Committee (Student Category)
Armiliah Aripin is a Singaporean editor currently based in London. Prior to pursuing an MA in Editing at the National Film and Television School (NFTS), she spent a decade editing TV documentaries (National Geographic, Discovery), dramas and promos (NBC, BBC, MTV). Some of the films that she has edited include Shé (Snake) by Renee Zhan (Sundance 2024), Strawberry Shortcake by Tan Siyou (Locarno 2021), Ajoomma by He Shuming (Busan 2022) and Dreaming and Dying by Nelson Yeo (Locarno 2023).
Charlyn Ng
Selection Committee (Student Category)
Charlyn Ng has produced commercials, feature films and scripted series across Asia. Charlyn executive produced and produced My Mini-me and Me (2021) and Forbidden (2021) for HBO Max, selected for Busan’s On screen section, and produced season 2 of HBO’s The Teenage Psychic (2017). Her recent producer credits include Thai feature film Operation Undead (2024), China Mini Series Be Your Knight (2024), Korea-Taiwan co-production The Secret House (2026), which premiered at Taipei International Film Festival in June 2025 and Singapore feature film Ah Girl (2026), which won the Youth Jury Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in February this year.
Selection Committee
Aditi Shivaramakrishnan
Selection Committee (Open Youth Category)
Aditi Shivaramakrishnan is a writer, editor, and arts worker. She has worked with and written for the Asian Film Archive, Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, and the Singapore International Film Festival. Her arts criticism, primarily on film and performance, and her creative nonfiction have been published in ArtsEquator, Jom, Portside Review, and elsewhere. She is an associate writer and researcher with Cinemovement and a Cinemata Community Curator 2026.
Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Selection Committee (Open Youth Category)
Elizabeth is an artist, lecturer and researcher whose practice traverses post-tropical environments, psychic rupture, and gothic materialism. Working across interdisciplinary media, lecture-performance, and public programming – between institutional spaces and underground circuits—she examines how excess and desire operate through obscured infrastructures and the phenomena shaping prosaic experience.
Adeleena Araib
Selection Committee (Open Youth Category)
Adeleena Araib is an arts professional with experience in independent cinema and cultural programming. Formerly Senior Programmes & Partnerships Manager at The Projector, and more recently supporting the launch phase of Filmhouse, Singapore’s new independent cinema, she has worked across film programming, strategic partnerships, audience development and venue operations. She is currently a mentor for emerging young film curators with Weekend Culture— a recurring cultural weekender that brings film, visual arts and music together through community-centred experiences.She enjoys working across creative spaces and communities, and supporting young creatives and emerging voices as they connect and share their stories with audiences.
Russell Morton
Selection Committee (Open Youth Category)
Russell Morton is a Singaporean filmmaker whose work blends Southeast Asian folklore and ritual with existential themes. His short films—The Forest of Copper Columns (2016), Fish (2019), and Saudade (2020)—have screened at festivals including Fantasia, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Raindance, MOTEL/X, SGIFF, and Jogja-NETPAC. He received the Most Outstanding SEA Director award at the Rolling Youth Film Festival in conjunction with the Busan International Film Festival in 2022.
As a cinematographer, Morton has collaborated on Ang Song Ming’s Recorder Rewrite, Singapore’s entry to the 58th Venice Biennale; Kenneth Dagatan’s In My Mother’s Skin (Sundance Film Festival, 2023); Jow Zhi Wei’s Tomorrow Is A Long Time (Berlinale, 2023); and Petersen Vargas’s Some Nights I Feel Like Walking (Tallinn Black Nights, 2024). He is currently developing his first feature film, Penumbra, which won the Autumn Meeting Arthouse Project prize in 2022.
Jury
Syaheedah Iskandar
Jury (Student Category)
Syaheedah Iskandar is a curator working with vernacular ways of seeing, thinking and being. Drawing on Southeast Asia’s visual culture(s), she looks into entanglements between the unseen and the hypervisual, and their translations across material and new media practices. Since joining Singapore Art Museum, she has worked on several projects, most recently, Elia Nurvista and Bagus Pandega: Nafasan Bumi ~ An Endless Harvest (2026), SAM Fellowship with Shooshie Sulaiman, Building a ‘non-institution’ institution (2024-2025) and Nguyen Trinh Thi’s 47 Days, Sound-less (2024). She was the curator working with Ponita Keo, recipient of the 8th Objectifs Documentary Award (Open Category), which culminated in the exhibition, The hair between us at the Chapel Gallery.
Alexander Lee
Jury (Student Category)
Alexander Lee is a Singapore-based film programmer, writer, and filmmaker whose interests lie in the region's socio-politics of land and space, and how they manifest in cinema. He programmes film screenings at the Asian Film Archive.
Dương Diệu Linh
Jury (Student Category)
Dương Diệu Linh is a Vietnamese film director renowned for her distinctive storytelling, which seamlessly blends hyper-realistic, slice-of-life narratives with elements of magical realism, drawing deeply from Southeast Asian mythology and superstitions. Linh’s debut feature, Don’t Cry, Butterfly (2024), which won the Grand Prix and the Most Innovative Film Award at the Venice Critics Week. Her earlier series of short films also garnered international acclaim, competing and winning awards at prestigious film festivals around the world. She has just completed the MFA in Film Production and Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, where she continued to experiment with narrative structures and refined her distinctive cinematic voice.
Aparna Nori
Jury (Student Category)
Aparna Nori is a visual artist and photographer based between Singapore and India. Her art practice draws from lived experiences with a particular interest in themes of personal memory and identity. Her response is articulated through a range of mediums including photography, alternative photographic processes, video art and the book form. Her artist book ‘How To Climb A Tree’ made the Winners list at the Belfast Photo Festival 2024, shortlisted at the Diecixdieci Photography Festival, Italy and the Athens Photo Festival. With a Master’s degree in Documentary filmmaking, her experience straddles artistic practice and commissioned work with publications and independent agencies in Asia, USA and UK.
Khairullah Rahim
Jury (Student Category)
Khairullah Rahim works across multiple media, incorporating structures, objects, and time-based media. He received his MFA in Visual Arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University (2023), and is currently an adjunct lecturer at McNally School of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore.
His research and artistic practice navigate queerness, poz resilience, and working-class vernaculars through strategies of resourcefulness and survival shaped by regimes of surveillance. Critiquing the ethics of legibility and disclosure, his work foregrounds opacity as a critical and protective representational strategy. Through collaborative methodologies, he attends to veiled narratives within his community, examining the entanglements of desire, labour, ambition, resistance, and safety.
Jury
Giselle Lin
Jury (Open Youth Category)
Giselle LIN is a Singaporean filmmaker and educator. Her short films have competed at international film festivals such as the Berlinale, Locarno Film Festival, Palm Springs ShortFest, Sarajevo Film Festival, Kurzfilm Hamburg, and TIDF. Giselle is always exploring what it means for us to inhabit/inhibit a story (and for a story to inhabit/inhibit us) and wants to forever make films filled with human truth, touch, and taste, films that people feel before understanding.
Zarina Muhammad
Jury (Open Youth Category)
Zarina Muhammad is an artist, educator, and researcher whose interdisciplinary practice moves across performance, installation, moving image, sound, text, and participatory encounters. Working through long-term, multi-sited research, she explores how myth, ritual, environmental change, geology, weather systems, and embodied sensing shape contemporary ways of knowing and inhabiting the world. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions and biennales including the 15th Gwangju Biennale, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Lahore Biennale, and the Singapore Biennale. She is the recipient of the 2022 IMPART Art Prize and currently teaches at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore.
Mok Cui Yin
Jury (Open Youth Category)
Cui is an interdependent arts producer and facilitator, and currently Head, Biennale at Singapore Art Museum. Since 2008, Cui has produced, consulted on, and managed projects across disciplines, scales, and contexts: with independent artists in contemporary art, performance, moving image, and literary arts; for organisations and platforms including Archifest, Arts x Tech Lab, Asian Film Archive, DesignSingapore Council, Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, National Arts Council, NTU CCA Singapore, Singapore International Festival of Arts, Singapore Writers’ Festival, and The Substation. Cui is also on the organising team for Producers SG and Asian Producers’ Platform, building networks and communities of practice for producers in Singapore and across Asia-Pacific.
K. Rajagopal
Jury (Open Youth Category)
K. Rajagopal is a filmmaker and theatre practitioner with over fifteen years of experience across stage and screen. As a short filmmaker, Rajagopal gained early recognition at the Singapore International Film Festival, where he won the Special Jury Prize for three consecutive years. His debut feature film, A Yellow Bird, premiered at the 55th Critics' Week of the Cannes Film Festival in 2016 and later won Best Film at the ASEAN Film Awards in 2017. In addition to his work in film and theatre, Rajagopal has directed multilingual television commercials for a wide range of corporate and government clients.
Daniel Hui
Jury (Open Youth Category)
Daniel HUI is a filmmaker and writer. A graduate of the film program in California Institute of the Arts, he is one of the founding members of 13 Little Pictures, a critically acclaimed independent film collective in Singapore. He has made four feature-length films—Eclipses (Pixel Bunker Award for International New Talent, Doclisboa IFF 2013), Snakeskin (Special Jury Award TFFDoc, Torino FF 2014; Award of Excellence, Yamagata IDFF 2015; Special Jury Mention, RIDM 2015), Demons (In Competition, Kim Jiseok Award, Busan IFF 2018; Berlinale Forum 2019), and Small Hours of the Night (Rotterdam IFF 2024).