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The 25th annual San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival proved to be at its core a celebration of art, regardless of the ethnicity of the featured players or filmmakers.
By Natasha Chen Out of the Fog
The festival booklet.
Image by Natasha Chen.
SF Resident Mike Kurokawa describes why he comes to the festival. Interview by Natasha Chen.
The Festival and Audience
The audience of this particular festival has doubled in the last five years, according to Taro Goto, the festival’s assistant director. This year’s goal is to reach an attendance of 30,000, which makes this occasion the largest growing film festivals in the nation. It’s already the biggest Asian film festival in North America.
“Recently we’re starting to see a lot of the non-Asian audiences really grow at the festival. We’ve started to show films at the Castro Theater, which is a great movie palace, with a built-in audience for great cinema,” Goto said.
Goto said that the preliminary years of the festival were spent mainly showcasing a limited number of films made about the relatively untold Asian experience. The history of Asian cinema only goes back to the 1970s. But since the ‘90s, more Asian American filmmakers have gotten formal training and education to make more narrative features for larger audiences, according to Goto. See “Close-up: Director Chris Chan Lee”.
This Year's Films
In 1997, four Asian American narrative features premiered at the festival in San Francisco. Goto said the press had dubbed it “Generation X” because the movies were young and hip with themes that stretched beyond the Asian American lens.
That universal appeal continued this year as many filmmakers returned to the festival. “The single most salient message that the films as a collective whole project would be that Asian American cinema is diverse, the quality is very high, and it’s to be reckoned with. And in the mainstream media, Asian American film doesn’t get noticed as much,” Goto said.
Some of the features drawing massive audiences include Na Kamalei: Men of Hula. This documentary charts the progress of the first Hawaiian all-male hula group’s journey to the Merrie Monarch Festival in 2005 on the group’s 30th anniversary. They even performed in the lobby of the AMC Theaters on Van Ness where the film was screened. A line of people waiting to the see the feature stretched through the entire first floor of the building. (See “Multimedia” on the right for the hula performance!)
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