DECEMBER 2008: In Between Screenings

It's a late Friday afternoon in December, and as I write this short note, the members of our Film Festival program committee will shortly walk through the door and deliver their verdicts on the first batch of feature-length entries from our Open Call. This process will be repeated throughout the weekend, as the sub-committee that programs the short film component will begin yet another long weekend sequestered in our offices to view wave upon wave of entries, some embarking on their film festival rounds with us; but many others in rough-cut form, hoping to premiere in Los Angeles next spring. The process, already well into its second month and due to last well into next February, will yield many surprises and discoveries, but more often than not will be filled with sessions in which committee members will encounter works they will disagree with, fight over, or just flat-out hate. In the end, as with every year, our group of hard-working programmers will fill out the program slate and call it a day, but deep down inside will chew over those singular decisions, those "if onlys" and "we really, really shouldas" for days and weeks after we deliver a final screening program to our organizing team.

In a sense I can empathize with the tasks our programmers are charged with: having pre-screened dozens of entries before the committee view them, I can say with a certainty that this year's crop on new works will delight and confound viewers -- that is, if we can find the space to show them. This year, The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, as all cultural events worldwide, is affected by the global economic downturn. For most mainstream film festival, this means cutting back on the frills -- one less music café, one less guest filmmaker to fly out from South America, a few less films to program. For events like ours, however, the consequences of a drastically curtailed budget are potentially more dire -- the loss of a venue (or two or three), a dramatically curtailed program slate, the inability to hire personnel to make the festival run smoothly, and a whole host of other cutbacks that threaten to compromise the experience of presenting a world-class film festival of Asian Pacific diasporic and international works for Greater Los Angeles and Southern California audiences. For now, I have a working budget that me and David Magdael, who co-directs the Film Festival, can use to guide our programming and organizing decisions. But who knows if we'll meet our fundraising targets, or if the economy tanks even further, prompting potential sponsors and supporters to pull back. Years ago, the programming chief of one of our local film festivals once confided to me his consternation with a potential financial shortfall and how cutbacks might threaten to curtail his event's growth. As he put it to me, "I remember when we were operating as a 'third-tier' film festival, and I sure don't want to go back to those days." All I have to say is, Amen brother, I don't us to cut back either. More to the point, I don't want us to LOOK like we're running a low-rent operation to our audience and supporters. In this day and age, persevering is admirable; visibly struggling arguably is not.

I'm thinking about this and a whole lot of issues these days, not just because the current economic unrest recalls similar upheavals when I first arrived at the doorstep of Visual Communications nearly twenty-eight years ago. In 2004 I wrote an introductory essay for our Film Festival's 20th Anniversary catalog reminiscing on how cultural and societal concerns influencing VC's mission were both different yet distressingly the same. In 2009 I can proudly say that Barack Obama IS not, nor WILL not be Ronald Reagan redux -- at least, I hope not. But left to work out is the whole issue of whether art and culture, and those whose mission and/or avocation it is to transmit the best and most honest aspects of divergent cultures to the mainstream, can be able to find a place in the new American society. The signs are mixed. California is still saddled with an Arts Council that is woefully underfunded and unable to support its artists communities; the current governor, who refuses to restore any funding to the Arts Council until state revenues and budgeting priorities warrant such an act (read: Ahh-nold ain't giving up the money, honey), is even more unlikely to do so now that the state budget is sagging under a $41-billion deficit that may never be balanced; and even our own Mayor of The City of the Angels, Señor Antonio himself, was quoted in our local daily some months after his election in 2006 as saying that to him, the arts were indeed a priority, but only as a "dessert" after a full-course meal of job security, beefed-up law enforcement, business development, and economic opportunity for our citizens. Mixed signals, indeed.

As for what we're doing here at Visual Communications: our groundbreaking Armed With a Camera Fellowship for Emerging Media Artists is undergoing a restructuring and relaunch next summer, meaning that the "Digital Posse" program that has become a Film Festival staple will be kept in dry-dock for 2009, to resume with brand-new works in 2010. But, another two rounds of video shorts produced through our partnership with Los Angeles Little Tokyo's DISKovery Center has been completed, meaning that we can expect a new crop of Digital Histories shorts by seniors next Spring. Me, David, and a crew composed of representatives of the major Asian Pacific American media arts centers will trek up to Park City beginning Jan. 15 to organize the eighth edition of the APA Filmmakers’ Experience Reception to honor and recognize our Asian Pacific and Asian international filmmakers whose works were selected to screen at the Sundance and Slamdance Film Festivals.

And speaking of 2010: April of that year will mark the organization's 40th anniversary as the nation's premier Asian Pacific American media arts organization. Though that milestone is still nearly two years away, it already feels so very close.

So for now, it’s back to screening entries, bracing for the rather boisterous firestorm that is our program committee, and initiating the process of shaping the 2009 Film Festival program line-up – all the while hoping that next year, a New Year, arrives more hopeful (if not so prosperous) than this one going out.

NOVEMBER 2008: It Begins Anew

It begins like this every year: a group of a dozen or so men and women gather to receive their instructions from the co-director and executive producer -- be thorough; balance tough-mindedness with open-mindedness; and choose with imagination and variety. These directives are put into practice soon enough, as one group gathers in a dark room the weekend leading into the Thanksgiving holidays, and another group is given a set of screeners with directives to view them without benefit of a fast-forward button on the remote. Before they are through, this group will plow through over three hundred individual films, both feature-length and short films alike (not including at least another hundred or so features viewed by the two co-directors), and sometime in early March 2009, they will arrive at a slate of nearly 150 hand-picked selections that are selected, programmed, and contextualized for an eager, waiting audience.

And so it begins anew...the viewing and selection process that will yield the final program schedule for the 25th edition of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival.

I have to admit that, having gone through this process for over twenty years, the process never gets any easier the longer you do it. Quite the contrary...as the quality of the work (and the skill level of our communities' artists) improves, the competition for an all-important space in the festival schedule becomes that more intense. There are many sessions still to sit through between now and March -- many discussions and disagreements to come, many pleasant surprises and discoveries to uncover. While it's way too early to reveal any surprises already uncovered at this early stage, I wonder if, with December and the Christmas season (not to mention Park City madness and/or disappointment) coming fast upon us, this year's selection process has many discoveries in store for us programmers. We'll keep you posted...

OCTOBER 2008: Reappraising The Big Picture

It's now a couple of weeks since I've returned home from my first programming research trip for the film festival, and frankly, I haven't had time to sit back and breath -- we're busy organizing a new traveling series of the 2008 Film Festival award winners; I've met for the first time this year with the programmers and put them on alert that the entries will be coming at them real fast; and as I write this, the American Film Market is days away from beginning. The producers and distributors I've been talking to will be arriving in our back-yard, so to speak, and hopefully we'll be able to begin securing just some of the many feature-length films we hope to present next spring.

In a sense, AFM 2008 begins just as American politics hits a crescendo: the presidential elections take place the day before, and unless one has spent the past couple of months hiding under a rock, the world has been in the throes of a financial meltdown, as the worldwide credit system has come in for a massive beating. No doubt, it would be easy to blame our outgoing president for many of the goings-on in recent months -- I've always felt that with a 5-star imbecile running our country the past eight years, American got exactly the kind of government it voted for. But I think that the blame has to go around, given the culture of greed coming from the American housing and financial industries. We got just what we deserved, indeed.

Already, our Festival organizing team is feeling the effects of this economic malaise: potential corporate sponsors are doing some belt-tightening, monies are getting harder and harder to come by, and on a state level, the California legislature is set to get dragged back into session the day after Election Day. It seems that the budget that was finally approved, over three month overdue, is already nearly $3 billion in the red, and those guys have to fix it or else. Times are tough all around...ahhh, to be employed at an American non-profit arts organization. But, as always, I digress...

If I drew any conclusions from my annual Vancouver/Busan/Honolulu trek this month, it's that the centers of good-quality Asian international film is once again undergoing a regional shift. In Busan, the trade and industry talk around the Pusan International Film Festival and Asian Film Market is that hallyu, the vaunted Korean Wave is in recess as reflected in the yearlong dearth of true box office champions and preponderance of critical and popular duds. It seems as though high-concept hits as THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WIERD and left-field surprises as THE CHASER are not so much the tip of an iceberg...figuratively, they instead represent the prize at the bottom of a half-eaten box of Cracker Jacks. Of course, I don't live in South Korea, so I don't know for a fact that South Korean cinema is indeed in a state of fre-fall. But for sure, what Korean films I did view in those intense three weeks didn't give me much hope.

Instead, my trip confirmed that the cinema of various Southeast Asian nations as Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand are as vibrant as ever. The digital Philippine cinema movement was on full display once again, though I think that by this time it's lost its surprise factor...I wonder what new auteurs will emerge to join the likes of Brilliante Mendoza, Lav Diaz, Khavn de la Cruz, and John Torres in redefining Philippine cinema? A new crop of works from the Peoples Republic of China has emerged recently, courtesy of their inclusion into Vancouver IFF, PIFF, and HIFF both this year and last, and offers a glimpse into the perspectives of a new generation of emerging filmmakers. And, I must admit I was pleasantly surprised at the range of new independent feature works being produced in Japan. As AFM gives wide berth to a host of Japanese distribution companies and studios, I'm waiting in anticipation for the works coming from the just-concluded Tokyo International Film Festival to make their market debuts.

In considering the wealth of new works coming down the chute, I wonder just how American audiences will receive this work. In addition to American audiences' well-known phobia toward subtitled films, I think that while solid films have been produced, I haven't really espied those films that possess that "WOW" factor; and of the few that do, they are already in line for theatrical showings. THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WIERD? If you don't catch it at AFI Film Fest, don't worry...CJ Entertainment plans to release it theatrically early next year. John Woo's RED CLIFF? At over four hours long, the American reaction to it has been, who's going to be able to sit still through it? And always, I mean always, we all want to know what Wong Kar-wai is up to. The obsession with the "surface" gloss of easily digestible cinema seems to conspire to obscure those hidden gems, the ones that promise great rewards for audiences who seek them out. I can't help but think about last month's posting: audiences only care about the home runs; they can't be bothered with the base hits. (Sigh!)

SEPTEMBER 2008: Time for a Reality Check

Sometime back in July of this year, I was summoned to a meeting with a pair of high-level foreign film company executives whose national cinema has been widely acclaimed over the past several years for its high degree of cinematic polish and popular appeal. The purpose of the meeting, as I was told, was to advise the suits as to the nature of moviegoing public in America and, more specifically, how their company can work with organizations and companies such as Visual Communications to "grow" the audience for their brand of product.

As it turned out, I might have done well not to crawl out of bed that morning. Accompanied by our Executive Director and Festival Co-Director, I take the meeting in a Century City office, where we start out by presenting our organization and talking up our film festival, our audience, and how we build avenues for filmmakers to gain traction in the mainstream industry. As one of the executives fidgets through the pages of our festival catalog, he got to the point and tosses out the question -- "Why are none of your films commercial studio blockbusters?" Through the ensuing 30 minutes, as he dismissively tosses our catalog around the table (no lie; he riffled through the pages as if he would a cheap stack on Monopoly money) and expounded on the worthlessness of independent cinema, it became clear to me -- the suits were in town to find out how to make "home-run" blockbusters that would break box office records worldwide, as if cranking out countless CROUCHING TIGERS, YOU-KNOW-WHAT and HOSTS was the answer to bringing in legions of audiences to their product. In short, they wanted to know from us how their films can find mainstream success in America -- "art-house" acclaim was unacceptable to them, they stated. They wanted to know what works for audiences, and how to give that product to the masses.

While an air of subtext hung heavy over that meeting (and I won't go into any of it here, let's just say that some of it is scandalous, and more of it reflects a stubborn belief in their company's product), this little episode takes me back to another time, nearly 14 years earlier, when another haughty and bull-headed company acquired the distribution rights to a film that was acknowledged as a watershed achievement in Asian Pacific independent cinema. That film, PICTURE BRIDE by the sorely-missed Kayo Hatta, was being handled by Miramax Films, a company that, especially back then in 1994, typified the industry's habit of securing distribution rights to independent films by people of colors without putting any work into long-lasting audience development strategies. PICTURE BRIDE's chequered box-office performance, and the rather peculiar promotional strategies that Miramax held for the film (eg.: lack of initiative in direct engagement with the target audience -- rather, community organizations such as Visual Communications and the old National Asian American Telecommunications Association reached out to Miramax and its field publicists to host sneak-preview showings of the film for its target audiences) came back to haunt me as our meeting ground to a halt, with Visual Communications staffers getting nothing out of it and, from the suits' perspective, no useful information on how to position its products for maximum and immediate success with Western audiences.

As I begin this, an online diary that will hopefully reflect on what developments we've observed over twenty-five years of organizing the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, I found that encounter from back in July instructive as a means of showing how not a whole lot has really changed in respect to how the mainstream regards the commercial viability of alternative voices and visions in mainstream entertainment. Oh sure, there have been signs that things are getting better -- with the passage of time, how could they not? A black woman single-handedly created a hit medical drama, GREY'S ANATOMY; an Asian American director from suburban New York directed two of Oscars' most-talked-about films of the past decade, CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN; director/producers ranging from our own Victor Vu to independent maverick Tyler Perry have circumvented the traditional studio and distribution network to get their works out to their own target audiences -- the ones that champion their work and know how and where to look for it. And closer to home, events such as the Film Festival have taken on a more indispensible role as a survey and, in some cases, a referendum on the vitality and pitfalls of our own mediamaking activity.

The question that a reviewer asked a couple of years ago in reference to Ham Tran's JOURNEY FROM THE FALL -- "Why can't such an artfully crafted and important film find mainstream distribution out of the gate?" could have easily been asked of award-winning works of recent vintage as KISSING COUSINS, EVE & THE FIRE HORSE, and many others like it. And I also admit that other well-respected, mainstream-caliber works including RED DOORS, FALLING FOR GRACE, SAVING FACE, THE MOTEL, and others have been met with either popular indifference or outright community outrage for daring to address the state of Asian Pacific America in truthful and candid terms. It seems that the diversity and range of our artists' creative endeavors are still being met by that old demon -- the need to create "one-size-fits-all" cinema that must satisfy everyone in the same way that film like THE JOY LUCK CLUB was obliged to do years before. I think we're bright enough to know the answer to that question: that is impossible. No single film can speak to a community, regardless of whether that "community" be a supposedly monolithic one, or a nuclear family confined within the walls of a suburban household.

Of course, I will be talking about all the things we have planned for our upcoming edition of the Film Festival, set this year for April 30 through May 7, 2009. But if international Asian studios are as concerned as Hollywood studios about hitting "home runs" instead of "base hits" -- and if you didn't get it already, I'm talking about making a long-term commitment to develop audiences for diverse and visionary cinematic voices and not about being fixated on developing audiences through blockbusters that won't hold up over time -- then I have to be concerned about what our own makers in our own backyards are creating. And more important, why.