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.
