In immersive vérité style, SEAT AT THE TABLE follows several prominent South Asian political candidates during the 2024 election cycle, alongside a community galvanized by the groundbreaking campaign of the first South Asian presidential candidate. With unprecedented access to congressional and state-level campaigns, as well as grassroots organizing efforts, the film captures a historic year for the South Asian diaspora as more candidates than ever run for office, providing us a rare front-row seat to an immigrant community awakening to its power in America.
Sarita Khurana is an award-winning filmmaker whose feature film, A SUITABLE GIRL, won the 2017 Best New Documentary Director Prize at Tribeca Film Festival. Her other films include THE LAST RESORT (2025), which won the Best Documentary award at the International South Asian Film Festival Canada, and the Emmy nominated short, CROSSROADS (2022) among others. Sarita is the co-founder of Cine Qua Non Lab, an international development lab and residency for filmmakers, based in Mexico and the U.S. Yoav Attias is an award-winning filmmaker and creative director. He is the co-director of FAULT LINES, a feature documentary about the housing crisis that premiered at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in 2024. He was a producer for the Peabody Award-winning docu-series Brick City featuring Cory Booker as the mayor of Newark. He served as the showrunner on Chicagoland, a docu-series for CNN, co-creator of the TV docu-soap Gainesville on CMT/Viacom, and supervising producer on Ocean Warriors.
Since 1978, the Asian American International Film Festival, produced by Asian CineVision, is the nation’s first and longest running festival of its kind and the premier showcase for the best Asian independent and Asian American cinema. AAIFF is committed to film and media as a tool for social change and to the support of diversity and inclusion in independent cinema and the Asian American media arts.