Live Octopus, A Giant Mall, and a Gazillion Movies (well, not exactly)

I took my first trip to Pusan, Korea, this October to attend the illustrious Pusan Int’l Film Festival. Now in its 14th year, the festival is characterized by its charming city surroundings and ambitious scope of programs. With more than 300 films, the festival also acts as a central wheel-and-deal hub for the Asian Film Market, including the Pusan Promotion Plan (PPP), which matches potential film projects with funding sources. It’s no wonder, then, that programmers and distributors from all over the world flock to the “Cannes of Asia” to vie for the hottest in art-house to blockbuster picks, often from new directors bound for international stardom.

I flocked there myself, and in addition to viewing about 20 films in 3 days (note: Pusan has a special screening area for industry people - you watch movies on VOD or DVD on a P.C.), I had a few moments to explore this unique coastal city and get the lay of the PIFF land.

Getting There

Look, there’s a huge man on stilts at the train station. Part of Korea’s take the train campaign.

Shinsegae

Shinsegae, one of PIFF’s venues, is the largest Department Store in the World.

Yes, I ate This

Pusan’s infamous seafood offerings. The tentacles stick to your mouth.

Our Old Friend Abe

My co-conspirator Abe Ferrer, the Exhibitions & Festival co-director at the VC Film Festival, was kind enough to show me around the town and fest.

Celebrity Spotting

Call me a sheep, but I joined a crowd gathering outside the mall, and guess who showed up!

Sights & Sounds

I heart Pusan (and Seoul :)

The San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival is proud to continue its annual Student Delegate Program. Aimed to engage students with Asian and Asian American cinema, the program strives to cultivate the next generation of scholars, artists, administrators and activists invested in the field of Asian American media.

As part of the Student Delegate Program, participants have the opportunity to:

• Participate in a structured program of screenings, events and meetings
• Access other festival events, i.e. panels, talks and parties
• Create online content for the SFIAAFF website

The program is open to both undergraduate and graduate students in colleges and universities. We encourage both non-film and film majors to apply. The most important qualities we seek in a candidate are a love for film and desire to share this passion, the ability to interact with other students and festival guests, and a willingness to follow a
rigorous program of screenings and discussions.

With only 6 spots available, each student’s full commitment to the program is mandatory. In addition, students will be asked to write an article, blog or create a video during the festival, as well as complete a post-festival survey.

Download the Application here.
Deadline: Dec. 31, 2009

For more information about the Student Delegate Program, email christine[at]asianamericanmedia[dot]org.

By Tracy Wang

In examining the variety of classes offered at institutions around the nation, I found some valuable information about the trends, both changing and consistent, in Asian American Film education. Although this is an informal survey, the findings below provide some interesting factoids.

• 60 universities and colleges that have Film Studies or Asian American departments with one or more classes focus on either an overview or a specific topic within Asian American Films
• The majority of these universities are located in coastal states with larger Asian American populations, such as California, Texas, and New York
• Institutions that offer the greatest variety of Asian American Film courses include Northwestern University in Illinois, New York University, and the University of California system
• The majority of survey Asian American Film classes typically involve the words Asian American, popular culture, film, and media in their title. The second most frequent grouping of words seen in these course titles includes race, performance, and Hollywood.
• The majority of Asian American Film classes are survey courses designed to introduce students to the study through topical issues and historical examination. For example, most of these classes focus on new topics each week, including gender, race performance, sexuality, immigration, family/generational changes, history of Hollywood, assimilation, and comparisons to other races.
• A specific course that Wellesley College offers covers Asian American women in film and media, while the University of California at Santa Barbara offers a course focused on Asian American men.
• Professor Julie Cho at UCSB teaches a rarely seen course titled “Asian American Documentary Practice.” Another important figure at UCSB is Professor Celine Parrenas Shimizu, who teaches the courses “Asian American Film, Television and Digital Media” as well as “Racialized Sexuality on Screen and Scene”.
• Northwestern University offers a class taught by Professor Nitasha Sharma on the topic of mixed-race Asian Americans, titled “HAPA Issues: Asian Americans of Mixed Racial Descent.”
• Professor Denton at Ohio State University offers a module in his class called “Asian Americans in Film” dedicated to Avant-Garde work, and in his classes references newly released films, including some featured at SFIAAFF. Another class not typically seen is “Immigrant Media,” taught by Professor Rodriguez at the University of Texas at Austin.
• Graduate courses generally go more in depth by focusing on a single module, often gender issues, or by taking a more critical approach to spectatorship and production in a graduate-level survey Asian American Film course.
• There is a variety of Asian American film professors in the University of California system. In addition to the professors mentioned earlier, Professor Beheroze Shroff at UC Irvine offers courses such as “Sexuality of Asians and Asian Americans in Film” and “Asian American Literature and Film Adaptations.”
• Digital Media is a field currently being explored by Professor David Keun Song at UCLA in his course “New Asian American Media.” At UC Davis, Professor Carlson offers a course entitled “Contemporary Issues of the Asian Transnational Adoption and Asian American Visual Culture.”
• The list of filmmakers usually taught and referenced in AA Film courses include Wayne Wang, Ang Lee, Alice Wu, Michael T. Uno, Christine Choy, Renee Tajima, D.W. Griffiths, Mira Nair, Kip Fulbeck, Greg Pak, Charles Brabin, and Richard Quine.
• Older films taught for historical context include Broken Blossoms, The Mask of Fu Manchu and The World of Suzie Wong.
• Narratives commonly seen amongst various syllabi include Chan is Missing, The Joy Luck Club, Who Killed Vincent Chin, The Wedding Banquet, Saving Face, The Namesake, The Wash, and Robot Stories.
• Other films that are related to CAAM that stand out among a few syllabi include Hollywood Chinese by Arthur Dong and Yours Truly, Miss Chinatown by Daisy Lin Shapiro.
• Though there are few narratives from recent years used to teach the modules, Professor Denton at Ohio State has an extended list of suggested films for his students to watch that include “Children of Invention” (2009) and “Deconstruction of a Korean Housewife” (2004).

Tracy Wang is a Bay Area native and Festival intern who frequents both films and class. You can e-mail her at twang@asianamericanmedia.org.

By Alvin Shen

“I began searching for a history – my own history – because I had known all along that the stories I had heard were not true, and parts had been left out. I remember having this feeling growing up, that I was haunted by something.”

–Rea Tajiri as quoted in Ghostlife of Third Cinema

What is the current state of Asian American film? And what exactly is Third Cinema? How do these two worlds intertwine? Glen Mimura explores these questions and more in his new book, Ghostlife of Third Cinema, published in 2009 by University of Minnesota Press.

Central to the author’s approach to dissecting the histories of Asian American and Third Cinemas is the idea of diaspora. But not just any diasporic scattering of peoples across the globe, specifically the Asian diaspora, from its origins as a byproduct of a world history shaped by migration, war, famine and racial exclusion in Vietnam, Japan, Korea, and China to new homelands in the U.S. and Canada. Drawing parallels with the Third Cinema Latin America movement in the ’60s, Mimura examines developments in Asian American cinema as a result of migration, decolonization and the impact of globalization.

In Ghostlife, Mimura doesn’t get too far ahead without taking time to familiarize the reader with “Third Cinema,” a social and political movement which embodied the values of liberation, independence, and decolonization, and spread throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia in the 1960s. Mimura then walks us through a brief history of the Asian diaspora, familiarizing us with the pain, struggle, and gains of social political art movements in the U.S. In later chapters, he also takes time to challenge readers with the prospect that perhaps Asian American “Third Cinema” as we know it – radical, progressive, laborious and refreshing – is dying with the continued rise of mainstream Asian American films.

Both an academic endeavor and an offering to the lay reader, the book draws readers into some classic Asian American films. From the travails of a wayward Cambodian American teen in Spencer Nakasako’s “A.K.A. Don Bonus” to Curtis Choy’s “The Fall of the I-Hotel,” which covers reflections on housing struggles amongst Filipino veterans in San Francisco, Mimura pays tribute to foundational Asian American films. The author also interestingly explores the emerging world of Queer Asian American media, and by doing so, not only succeeds to educate and immerse readers, but also draws greater attention to some of the hidden tales of Asian American film and media.

Mimura dedicates an entire chapter to the exploration of the emergence of the Asian sexual diaspora. And as far as queer cinema has come, queer ASIAN cinema’s struggle rightfully embodies the Third Cinema spirit of marginalized peoples. Mimura draws on the stories of the queer Asian movement of the 1980’s when frustration over lack of proper representation and recognition drove organization for social and political solidarity. From that emerged social groups, and print publications such as Q&A, Queer in Asian America. Mimura also explores the evolution of sexual commoditization in Asia, and the exotic nature of the fascination. He distinctly cites Paul Bautista’s 1992 film “Fated to be Queer” set in the Bay Area as a movie that tries to dispel the racist erotic fascination with queer Asian Americans that previous works such as “Maybe I Can Give You Sex?” addressed in Southeast Asia.

Overall, Ghostlife is a thorough academic piece that extends the cultural studies of this nation and the globalized viewpoint of racially marginalized people.

Ghostlife of Third Cinema represents Glen Mimura’s first offering in Asian American literary publishing. Mimura currently serves as an associate professor of film and media and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Alvin Shen is currently earning his M.F.A. in Directing, Editing and Screenwriting as a graduate film student at the Academy of Art University. Alvin is serving at CAAM as a film festival intern for 2010, but likewise wouldn’t mind spending a good portion of that year chasing the winter season in both hemispheres for some of the world’s best snowboarding. Contact him at ashen@asianamericanmedia.org.

What: Toronto International Film Festival, Sept. 10-19

Follow Festival Assistant Director Vicci Ho as she tweets her way through one of the most prestigious international film festivals in the world. Twitter Account: VicciHo

by Geraldine Ah-Sue

I’ve been thinking about the idea of suspicion lately. There is a lot to be wary about: a world that perpetuates violence, racism that permeates both culture and politics, the uneven distribution of capital across nation-states. It seems that the feeling of suspicion is not exactly unwarranted. Amidst the glum and gloom, however, the idea of suspicion also alludes to what I consider to be its much brighter side – the possibility of something else, for difference to exist, and for the creation of counter-narratives and counter-cultures. It is ultimately between the depressing and the hopeful that suspicion teeters on a precarious line of unsettled possibility, and it is the reclamation of this imagination these ramblings focus on.

It seems that the impetus for social change is almost always a result of some good old-fashioned doubt. For example, when thinking about the history of Asian/American representation in U.S. circuits of culture, I think that it must have been suspicion that led folks like Loni Ding, Jim Yee, and Bob Uyeki to reject the then-current state of Asian/American media representation, and to subsequently join in the effort of regaining control over its production and circulation through the formation of the National Asian American Telecommunication Association (NAATA), later renamed as the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM). Even at present, I would argue that there must be some slight inkling of suspicion that continues to motivate the work that CAAM does today, in its persistent pursuit of new articulations of Asian/American representation and identity that both challenge and redefine what ‘Asian/American’ means to U.S. culture today.

But, something tells me there’s more to suspicion than sheer reaction to the status quo, because as I found myself engrossed in my first-ever San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) this year, what was most apparent throughout the 11-day event was a feeling of regenerative joy! Looking up at the Castro Theatre marquis with the words “27th SF Int. Asian American Film Festival” proudly glowing in big bold letters amongst a crowd that was buzzing with real excitement on Opening Night, I came to realize that suspicion is not always about cynicism. What might have started out as a project of cultural doubt in 1980 has, in 2009, continued to flourish as a site where the all-important work of community building still takes place. Just to see a 1400-seat theater completely filled with eager, smiling people – people like you and me, and people who probably also started out from a place of unsettledness toward the cultural hegemony of racial representations in U.S. culture – is indeed a testimony to what suspicion can arouse. For not only are we talking about over 1,000 strangers uniting under the banner of the SFIAAFF on this one single night, but most fundamentally, we are talking about well over 1,000 individual, separate lives coming together, and in that gathering, collectively creating something social, cultural, and ultimately political.

This, for me, signifies the always-growing hope of suspicion – that is, the infinite range of political possibility that suspicion can ignite. Yes, while suspicion can, and has, led to many dark corners of our world history, it has also importantly sparked great political movements such as the fight for Third World decolonization and the need for cultural democracy. It has led the way for works like Wayne Wang’s Chan is Missing, or Deepa Mehta’s Element trilogy, to take root in our cultural reorganization of the past, present, and future state of affairs, and has given rise to the raucous laughter I heard at H.P. Mendoza’s Centerpiece premier of Fruit Fly at this year’s festival, or the captivated silence I was part of during the 2009 SFIAAFF’s Closing Night film, So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain. Suspicion can lead us to a multitude of marvelous places full of emotion, camaraderie, and purpose, for it is a politic of unbounded affect that ultimately sustains these places of political unpredictability, and events like the SFIAAFF that effectively harness that affect into a bright, bright future.

Geraldine is an avid fan of Asian/American cultural studies who recently received her Master’s Degree in Women and Gender Studies from San Francisco State University. A festival intern for the past year, Geraldine is also a connoisseur of what time of day the festival office gets the most sunlight and believes in the strict use of dark window blinds to shield the vampires. Contact her at gahsue@asianamericanmedia.org.