by L. Somi ROY and La Frances HUI
A bridge between past festivals’ programs and the ones to come. That was what John C. Woo, Executive Director of Asian CineVision (ACV), had in mind when he approached us to program AAIFF’13.
For us this directive represented a special opportunity, not only to work together for the first time, but also to contemplate the evolution of what it means to be Asian and Asian American and the shifting landscape of film exhibition. Never far below the surface as we lobbed ideas back and forth between us was our shared knowledge and admiring appreciation for the pioneering and now flagship work that ACV has done over the years in bringing Asian and Asian American cinema to audiences in New York.
Since our combined years working with ACV, the scope and nature of films and film festivals have changed, to state the obvious. Not only was there an exponential increase in the kinds of media and ways of appreciating them but also an increase in the sheer number of festivals, even Asian ones. So what then, we asked ourselves and each other, did ACV’s festival represent, what niche does it occupy, what role does it, and can it, play?
The first issue to come to mind was one that had been the defining mainstay of AAIFF from the very early days. It was the programming interplay between Asian cinema and films made by the Asian American community. Did they share much? Not really sometimes; not most of the times maybe; but surely, like DNA, there have been ineluctable strands.
Thinking of what these strands were was the beginning of our curatorial exploration. What these strands led us to think, in many ways, was that the festival and our programming speaks not only to the films we admired, puzzled over, or championed as cinema, as entertainment, as works of art. It also reveals what these films mean to us, to the experience of being Asian—in a new global context—when it is increasingly common for Asians to make films in America and Americans to make films in Asia. Is it at all necessary for us, both originally from Asia but having lived a combined half a century in the US, to draw a distinction between “Asian” and “Asian American”?
Therefore the interplay between the film as an artistic expression of a medium and the effect of the film on the way we feel about the community, our sense of belonging (or not), its message about how we see and represent ourselves in the larger culture, is what made programming for AAIFF special to us and distinct from all our other curatorial ventures.
Now none of this could have happened if it was not fun. It was fun to watch the films and fun to work with the lively and passionate staff at ACV. So thank you, ACV for the shared opportunity. And thank you filmmakers for affording us a look at ourselves through our shared passion for film. All that is left now is for us to say that we enjoyed the process and now we hope you enjoy the result.
L. Somi Roy’s picture courtesy of Nan Melville