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...
