26th Asian American Film Festival
Not to be confused with the 11th San Francisco Asian Film Festival coming later this year, we presume…
SF’s Asian American Film Festival starts this week.
26th Asian American Film Festival
G. ALLEN JOHNSON
It’s fitting that Wayne Wang is the main honoree at the 26th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. The director made his name with Asian-themed films such as “Chan Is Missing” and “The Joy Luck Club,” but has shifted effortlessly to Hollywood, where he directed Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes in “Maid in Manhattan” and Queen Latifah in “Last Holiday.”
And yet, to get his passion projects made, such as his opening-night film, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” - about an Americanized daughter whose father visits, disapprovingly so, from China - he must join forces with Asia for valuable partnerships.
“After working in Hollywood, it was like I had to relearn how to make films,” Wang said at a festival news conference at the Sundance Kabuki last month. “I hadn’t made an Asian-themed film in 15 years, or an independent film in quite a while (2001’s “The Center of the World”).”
That kind of re-education is becoming more commonplace. Across the United States, Asian filmmakers and actors are not banking solely on Hollywood enlightenment or American money to realize their dreams.
Actress Joan Chen, like Wang a San Francisco resident, has acted alongside Peter O’Toole, Rutger Hauer, Christopher Walken, Tommy Lee Jones, Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine. Twenty years after “The Last Emperor” won best picture and established her as a star in the United States, she’s logging frequent-flier miles to Asia and beyond - her performance in the festival’s closing-night film, “The Home Song Stories,” was turned in Down Under for Australian Chinese director Tony Ayres.
“It is more vibrant now,” Chen said of the Asian film business. “And hopefully, in China, the censorship will become a rating system.”
And Hollywood? Most of Chen’s stateside work has come in the independent arena.
“I did turn a couple of (American) independent films down, but there aren’t a lot of big studio offers at all,” she said.
Daniel Wu can relate. Born and raised in the Bay Area and a graduate of the University of Oregon, Wu has become an A-list star in Asia. His Hong Kong-Chinese film “Blood Brothers,” a big-budget gangster saga, plays at the festival.
“Having lived there for 10 years, I feel more Hong Kong than American,” said Wu, who is scheduled to appear at a panel discussion at the festival called “Crossing Over: Asian Americans and Asia.” “Because basically my maturing years have been spent in Hong Kong. … You see it from a third-party perspective, and you see it differently than we do.”
Perhaps most striking about the latest trend is the cooperation between independent filmmakers and Asia. Korean companies in particular are jumping into the fray; they have poured significant money into two New York-shot American independent films with Korean themes being shown at the festival: Michael Kang’s “West 32nd” and Gina Kim’s “Never Forever.”
“Never Forever” especially shows the dichotomy between Asians and Asian Americans. Caucasian actress Vera Farmiga (“The Departed”) plays a character who is married to a Korean American businessman and is unable to get pregnant. To get the baby she thinks will save their marriage, she enlists the help of a Korean illegal immigrant, hoping to pass off any offspring as her husband’s.
“It was a big plus to see something so daring - if I may say - to see explicit sex scenes between a Caucasian woman and an East Asian man,” said Kim, who was born in South Korea, taught at Harvard and is now based in New York. Kim got her script to noted Korean director Lee Chang-dong, which proved to be a stroke of good fortune.
“We got some money from Prime Entertainment, one of the biggest studios in Korea, and also got substantive money from the government - grant money from the Korean Film Council,” Kim said.
Other examples of East-West collaborations include a fascinating documentary about kamikaze pilots, “Wings of Defeat,” in which Japanese American Risa Morimoto is able to draw some surprising revelations from former kamikaze-trained pilots. That Morimoto is American and female might have helped the men - who live in a society that does not encourage frankness - to open up.
Anthony Gilmore might have had a similar advantage when he spoke to former Korean sex slaves in his “Behind Forgotten Eyes,” narrated by Yunjin Kim - an actress who has bounced from Korea (“Shiri”) to Hollywood (the TV series “Lost”).
No wonder festival director Chi-hui Yang said at the news conference that he and his crew had thought better of dropping the “international” from the festival’s official name, even though “it’s one of the longer festival names out there.”
Assistant festival director Taro Goto is even going so far as saying Asian Americans now have an advantage in some aspects of the entertainment field, thanks to the new paradigm. As he writes in an essay published in the festival program, “Their cross-cultural perspective gives them versatility and the ability to transcend national borders, which translates into both cultural and commercial value.”
Lest you think this is a new phenomenon, consider the festival’s retrospective programs.
Once again the festival is visited by Anna May Wong, the patron saint of Asian American crossover film artists. The Los Angeles-born actress who became a noted star in American silent films and shot to larger fame working in German and British silent films is the subject of a new documentary, Elaine Mae Woo’s “Anna May Wong: Frosted Yellow Willows.”
But most fascinating is the case of Sacramento-born singer-dancer Betty Inada, one of a wave of Japanese American jazz artists who became stars in Japan in the 1930s.
“Whispering Sidewalks” (1936), which plays Saturday at the Castro, was Japan’s first musical.
Inada plays an American singer-dancer who goes on tour in Japan but is swindled by her managers. Penniless, she casts her lot with a group of struggling musicians, singing songs such as “La Cucaracha” and “Blue Moon” along the way.
More than 70 years later, going global is noble once again for Asian American artists.
San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival: Thurs.-March 23. Sundance Kabuki, Castro and Clay theaters in San Francisco; Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley; and Camera 12 Cinemas in San Jose. (415) 865-1588, asianamericanmedia.org/2008. For G. Allen Johnson’s festival picks, go to sfgate.com.
And a frown at the same time 
Even having been in the Bay Area, San Diego was still a trek for me.