From the "On The Scene" Archives:

by Augusta Palmer

The 21st Asian American International Film Festival (AAIFF) opens at Manhattan's Florence Gould Hall on tomorrow with the presentation of the first-ever Asian American Media Award for Lifetime Achievement to Ismail Merchant, producer, director, and half of the famed Merchant Ivory filmmaking franchise. After a screening of Merchant's 1994 film "In Custody," the festival proper starts off with a bang: the adrenaline-pumping Hong Kong action film "The Blacksheep Affair," directed by Ching Siu-Tung (of "A Chinese Ghost Story" and "Heroic Trio" fame).

This year's festival, presented as always by Asian Cinevision (ACV), continues through August 1st in Manhattan with a cavalcade of films from the U.S., Canada, India, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and the Philippines; then it's on to the Brooklyn Heights Cinema for a celebration of "New Asian American Independent Cinema" which spans the weekend of August 7th-9th; and, lastly, on August 22nd and 23rd, there will be "A Tribute to Filipino Cinema" at the New Center Cinema in Sunnyside, Queens.

Festival Director Vivian Huang sat down with indieWIRE during the steamy, hectic days leading up to the festival to talk about about some of the high points of this year's offerings and Asian CineVision's twenty-two year history.

Among this year's festival highlights is Zhang Yimou's new film "Keep Cool" - an urban comedy about unrequited love and irrational violent urges which should defy the expectations of anyone familiar with his cycle of Gong Li films - it debuts on July 26. Another strong piece of work, in an entirely different vein, is Rea Tajiri's "Strawberry Fields," an evocative coming-of-age story set in the early seventies in which a young woman comes to terms with death, her own sexuality, and her parents' secrecy about their experiences in a California internment camp.

This year's festival features about forty shorts and twenty features. Many of the features already have a distributor, but Huang expects several shorts to get picked up for distribution because of their screening at the festival. In encouraging words to indie filmmakers everywhere, Festival Director Vivian Huang closed our conversation about the festival by saying, "There are so many niche markets out there that no one pays enough attention to. When people think about making a film, they're usually imagining a narrative feature film that has to be shown at the cineplex. But there are so many venues out there that you just need to take the time and do the research to find."

This year's festival also includes a master class in filmmaking with documentarian Loni Ding following a screening of her videos on the history of Asians in the Americas from the 16th through the 19th century. New this year are several days of video screenings, ranging from rare video histories of Philippine film to profiles of Bruce and Brandon Lee.

ACV began as a cooperative film production company; but its founders quickly realized that there was no venue for their products so they started the festival to showcase the work of Asian American filmmakers. At first the festival consisted mainly of short films because few Asian American directors had access to the resources to make feature films. Then the festival began to program feature films from Asian countries which had been unable to find a foothold in the American market. Gradually, as more Asian American directors began to make features and more films from Asia began to receive awards on the international film festival circuit, the AAIFF evolved into the richly varied combination of shorts and features from around the world it is today.

Showcasing Asian American films is still the primary purpose of the festival. According to Huang, "What distinguishes us from other Asian American film festivals is that we are very artist-oriented. We showcase work by filmmakers or videomakers with Asian heritage regardless of the contents of their work. Every year we have several films which have nothing to do with Asia or Asians. We accept all genres: documentary, experimental, narrative. It's not our position to censor people's work."

ACV thus exhibits all the positive qualities of identity politics (a showcasing of Asian and Asian American work programmed by Asian Americans) without ever falling into the negativity of political correctness (assigning any unitary meaning to "Asian American" or making content requirements for artists). To say that the festival is "artist-oriented" is an immense understatement. In 1988, for example, the AAIFF willingly canceled their screening of "Daughter of the Nile" because it was "in the best interest of the director, Hou Hsiao-hsien, to be able to premiere it at the New York Film Festival instead." In fact, the AAIFF has introduced New York audiences to the work of Asian American directors like Wayne Wang and Ang Lee as well as Asian directors like Taiwan's Tsai Mingliang (a darling at Cannes '98 for his film "The Hole") long before any other venue was willing to chance it. This faith in fledgling talents has been rewarded many times - Wang and Lee in particular have been willing to support the festival in any way they can, including teaching master classes last year as a part of the festival program.

The last-minute changes and bargain basement budgets familiar to independent filmmakers are also fixtures at the low-budget film festival. Although AAIFF has major sponsors like Budweiser and Universal Pictures, it's not always easy to get films all the way to the New York festival. According to Huang, the producers of one film agreed to show their film in the festival earlier in the year; however, they insisted that AAIFF had to foot the bill for sending someone from the production staff to accompany the print from an Asian nation to the festival. So Huang had to find both an airline and a hotel to sponsor the film. Yet, in the end, the production company decided to just ship the film on its own. Even better was the fax from St. Petersburg telling Huang the flight number - but not the airline or even the airport - for a plane on which a print was arriving.

After the New York festival closes, a variety of the films will be taken on tour to venues in the U.S. and Canada.

[For ticket information and directions call the AAIFF Festival hotline: (212) 925-6014 or consult a full festival program listing at: www.asiancinevision.org.]

[Augusta Palmer is a freelance film writer and doctoral candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University whose dissertation will focus on Chinese cinema in the 1990's.]