2012 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (May 10-20 2012)

Patty Ahn (bio)
USC School of Cinematic Arts
pahn@usc.edu

 
In May of 2012, Visual Communications hosted its 28^th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (LAAPFF), offering ten days filled with feature-length films, short programs, panels, and social events that formed a cross-section of the current state of Asian American media. Visual Communications (VC), a Los Angeles-based media collective founded in 1970 by four UCLA EthnoCommunications students, launched the festival in 1983 to promote Asian and Asian American cinema in the U.S. Initially offering a program of twenty films, LAAPFF now features more than 150 and has grown into a cultural and intellectual forum where filmmakers, producers, audiences, and critics discuss what they see dramatized on-screen: the challenges and potential futures for a minority media struggling to survive at the margins of a risk-adverse Hollywood. Strikingly, even though the modern studio system is based in Los Angeles, a city that houses one of the country’s largest and most diverse populations of diasporic Asians we have yet to see a significant increase in Asian and Asian American industry workers. LAAPFF thus aims to showcase the work of filmmakers emerging from the local L.A. communities as well within the international arena.
 
LAAPFF 2012 seemed to portend progress as the West Hollywood-based Directors Guild of America (DGA) and Koreatown’s CGV cinema complex spilled over with excited moviegoers. At the same time, it animated, for this attendee at least, a number of uncertainties and contradictions that inevitably accompany a media environment in the midst of a major transformation around how content is produced and distributed. Abraham Ferrer, who has served as VC’s curatorial director since 1987, notes in an interview that across its name changes-“Asian American International Film Festival” (1983), “The Los Angeles Asian Pacific American International Film Festival” (1987), “VC FilmFest” (2000)—the festival has always aimed to facilitate a variety of production models and cater to multiple audiences.¹ He identified three major, sometimes intersecting, trajectories in the festival’s history: one driven by independent artists, a second steered by a steadily-increasing number of filmmakers aspiring to break into the mainstream industries, and a third which emerged in the 1990s when practitioners began to experiment with online digital technologies (Ferrer). Throughout its history, LAAPFF has carefully navigated Southern California and the Asian-Pacific region’s cultural geographies while facing a shrinking pool of state resources, an increasingly cutthroat media marketplace, the differing tastes of the international art cinema circuit and global Hollywood, and the ascendance of affordable digital productions. While these pressures have been present since the festival’s inception, this year’s event highlighted some of the anxieties the neoliberal marketplace has activated within the Asian American media landscape. I offer here a critical review of LAAPFF 2012 that teases out some of these tensions and shares insights offered by VC’s veritable living archive, Abraham Ferrer, about the historical trajectories of VC and its festival.
 
LAAPFF’s unwavering support of independent filmmakers grows out of the political groundwork paved by its founding organization. VC began in 1970 with the explicit aim of empowering members of the Asian American community to re-represent their own history and experiences. This media collective aligned with the decolonization and Third Cinema movements taking place in Africa, Asia, and especially Latin American throughout the 1960s. The term “Third Cinema,” coined by Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino, encompassed a growing international commitment to creating films that would lead to the radical liberation from a U.S.-led first world capitalism, epitomized by Hollywood’s corporatized, hierarchical studio system (Mimura 30). Thus, VC built educational programs aimed at transforming filmmaking into an accessible, self-sustainable, and collaborative process (Mimura 37). These foundational commitments continue to inform curatorial choices made by LAAPFF’s programmers today, such as the decision to spotlight Musa Sayeed’s feature film debut, Valley of Saints (2012, India), at an opening night screening. Shot on location on a shoestring budget, using only DSLR cameras, no script, and non-professional actors, Valley belongs to a filmmaking tradition once embraced by VC and Third Cinema film collectives. Yet, it also stands as one among many examples of the sharp turn Asian American media has taken away from a U.S.-based identity politics once galvanized by VC.
 
Set in the fall of 2010 against the backdrop of India-occupied Kashmir, Valley‘s story focuses on a small community living around the perimeter of Dal Lake, the region’s main tourist attraction, which now faces severe environmental degradation. The film drops us in medias res into the quotidian world of its protagonist, Gulzar, who cares for his aging uncle while working for a small boat tour business with his closest friend, Afzal. We learn early on that Gulzar and Afzal plan to leave behind their humdrum life on the lake, but Valley’s narrative does not follow a strict three-act linear structure. Rather, the film unfolds into a series of lyrical vignettes that invite us into the callow yet tender bond between these two men who together survive idleness and violence in war-torn Kashmir. Luscious, melancholic images of Dal Lake appear in many scenes, as a sense of nostalgia for pre-occupation Kashmir, when time did not feel imperiled by violently-enforced military curfews and environmental decay, is cast across the water’s reflective surface. In a post-screening Q&A with the largely Kashmiri audience, the American-born Sayeed explained that while his father, who had been a political prisoner in Kashmir, often mused about the unparalleled beauty of his homeland, Sayeed did not learn to speak Kashmiri and had only visited the region once as a child before making this film. However, rather than locating his experience of displacement within a U.S. cultural framework, he shared a deeply personal and unsettling examination of exile and return, reminding us of cinema’s power to bring together diasporic communities.
 
Positioned from the start as an international festival, LAAPFF invites a complex range of works from its filmmakers, but it also has been inflected by broader political shifts in Asian American media culture.² Ferrer notes that after the conservative backlash against affirmative action began to shut down academic programs like EthnoCommunications in the late 1970s, newer generations of media practitioners who came of age in the 1980s became increasingly removed from earlier political struggles. In a sense, they benefited from the groundwork built by film collectives like VC and practitioners like Arthur Dong, Christine Choi and Felicia Lowe, whose work remained committed to the struggles and issues of the Asian American community and maintaining an independent media (Ferrer). Media-makers experienced a certain representational freedom to pursue new kinds of stories. On one hand, this has allowed for more imaginative productions, like LAAPFF 2012’s program of queer shorts, I’ve Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good). Curated by Erica Cho, this collection included pieces from Indonesia, Lebanon, and South Korea that were provocative and moving but not particularly concerned with naming the struggles of queer Asian life in different national contexts. Rather, it culled pieces like Chupachups (Kyung Ji-suk, 2011, South Korea), a story about an ardent relationship between two South Korean women who reunite one last time before one must leave to be married, with Gaysian Dream (Bernie Espinosa, 2011, U.S.), a brief peek into a young Asian American man’s fantasy world in which a chorus of drag queens (played by the Asians of Gay Men’s Chorus of L.A.) sing a version of Katy Perry’s pop single “Teenage Dream.” Another LAAPFF opening night feature, The Crumbles (Akira Boch, 2012, U.S.), narrates the tumultuous friendship between two Asian American women in their early 20s who decide to form a rock band together. Set in the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Echo Park and Silver Lake and made on a small budget with the help of a wide network of friends, family, and fellow filmmakers, the film drew a strong local community into DGA’s screening room that night, though it hardly expresses political ambitions. Rather, it more modestly shows two Asian American women playing strong leading roles in a rock film, a genre historically populated by white men in both mainstream and independent contexts.
 
The liberalization of the U.S. marketplace throughout the 1980s and VC’s geographical and cultural proximity to Hollywood as a material place, professional network, and aesthetic/economic system partly account for the increase in LAAPFF filmmakers looking to break into the mainstream industries. During his 1981-1989 presidency, Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood actor, held a vested interest in protecting the institutional and financial power of the major corporate movie studios, effectively gutting government funding for the arts (Holt). In many ways, mainstream avenues became the most, or perhaps only, viable option for many hopeful filmmakers. Since then, the further deregulation of the entertainment industry, the globalization of Hollywood, and the fracturing of audiences into an array of niche markets have only made it more difficult for Asian Americans to find a place in an industry that invests in minority demographics only to the extent that they are attractive for advertisers. For years, corporate executives have remained in a speculative gridlock about whether cultivating a distinct Asian American content market would result in long-tail profit, and whether Asian faces even attract Asian American viewers. Universal Pictures’ purchase of a spot in LAAPFF’s program for a sneak preview of its multimillion-dollar production Battleship (Peter Berg, 2012), underscored this dilemma. Studio executives assumed that the festival’s crowd would find the film relevant because it features a well-known Japanese actor (Tadanobu Asano) in a leading role. Ferrer admits that Battleship, which packed the theater with excited viewers, did not align with the festival’s aims of encouraging Asian American stories and images more complex than those Hollywood has historically offered (Ferrer). However, VC, one of many non-profit media organizations affected by state funding for the arts, was hardly in a financial position to turn down the studio’s offer.
 
In the last ten years, the industry’s drawn out ambivalence toward Asian American consumers has been countered by an explosive rise of Asian American media productions on the web, fervently re-energizing the question of this community’s so-called market value. LAAPFF’s documentary feature line-up included the world premiere of Uploaded: The Asian American Movement (Kane Diep, 2012, U.S.), a 90-minute history of how YouTube has provided a platform for Asian Americans singers, actors, and comedians who would otherwise have no outlet in the mainstream market. Composed of talking head interviews with a number of online pioneers like Kevin Wu (the comedian known as KevJumba), Mike Song from Kaba Modern dance crew, and the members of Just Kidding Films, the film exudes a celebratory energy about how close Asian Americans have come to building a self-sustaining, autonomous media culture and economy.
 
Indeed, a disproportionately high number of Asian Americans now earn a reasonable profit by monetizing their YouTube channels, proving that they do not need to go through traditional avenues like pitching to network executives or signing a deal with a major studio or record label. However, as Ferrer notes, the history portrayed in Uploaded does not situate what it dubs as the “movement” within the longer history of independent Asian American media and activism (Ferrer). While the film suggests that privatized online platforms can be used to distribute media, it does not address the limitations around the kind of content (short-form versus long-form, comedic versus dramatic, classical versus experimental, etc.) that draws the subscribers and ad dollars needed to support oneself with online media; it is not yet clear whether the self-promotional culture of YouTube can allow for the communal strategies necessary for sustaining an independent media. Online stardom hardly guarantees an opening or access for other generations of Asian American media-makers. That a group of young, talented filmmakers who have made a documentary about Asian American media must still travel through the film festival circuit to secure a distribution deal proves this. It remains to be seen whether the online media terrain will merely replicate the bottom-line logic of the neoliberal media marketplace or offer a democratic field accessible for those who actively opt to circumvent mainstream institutions like Hollywood or television.
 
In my final exchange with Abraham Ferrer, he remarks that VC’s goal has always been, and will continue to be, to give filmmakers the tools to make cinema that speaks to its audiences. It is VC’s challenge to observe and support the growth of these artists across all platforms. Ferrer only hopes that people remember the work that this organization has done and the historical contours in which Asian Americans make their media.

Patty Ahn is a Ph.D. Candidate in Critical Studies at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Her research interests include critical histories and theories of U.S. television, transnational media studies with a regional focus on the Pacific Rim, gender and sexuality, and sound and popular music. She has been published in Spectator, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Discourse, and is currently serving a two-year term as co-chair of the SCMS Queer Caucus.
 
 

Footnotes

 

1. The festival initially adopted the name “Asian American International Film Festival” (AAIFF) because it borrowed its program from the traveling edition of Asian CineVision’s festival of the same name.