By Jia H. Jung, California Local News Fellow
CAAMFest, presented by the Center for Asian American Media and known prior to 2013 as the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, is back for its 42nd year. Since 1982, the event has been the largest showcase of Asian and Asian American film.
This year’s fully in-person event, held at SFMOMA Phyllis Wattis Theater, the Roxie Theater, and The Great Star Theater in San Francisco and The New Parkway Theater in Oakland, features 35 events of film, food, music, and ideas, under the theme of Shining Light on Asian American Stories.
CAAMFest 2024 kicks off Thursday, May 9, with an Opening Night film screening at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre of the affirmative action documentary Admissions Granted, which follows the dramatic Supreme Court case involving Asian American plaintiffs versus Harvard University.
A gala will follow the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where guests will be able to enjoy special exhibitions such as Phoenix Kingdoms: The Last Splendor of China’s Bronze Age, head upstairs to dance to live-spun selections by DJ TIGERMOM TOY, also known as Allyson Toy, and delight in authentic dishes from Sitha’s Khmer Kitchen, Henry Hsu’s Oramasama Dumplings, Malaysian-inspired sweets from Batik and Baker, Palestinian cooking from Mama Lamees, and baked goods and treats from Year of the Snake, Grand Opening, and Socola. Tickets, $90 for the film and party together and $30 for the film alone, and discounted by $10 for students, seniors, and persons with disabilities, are available here.
LATEST STORIES
“As we are entering an election year in a socio-politically shapeshifting world that can feel uncertain, we look to artists and storytellers to ground us and remind us of the responsibility of our shared humanity. With this year’s CAAMFest, we are proud to lift the voices of these brave and tender storytellers,” said festival and exhibitions Director Thúy Trần, in a statement.
Trần also referred to the vastness and infinity of Asian narratives, evident in a lineup of films representing the Filipino diaspora of California’s Bay Area, a Cambodian American women’s basketball phenom, an elite Japanese rock climber, Korean Americans growing up in early 2000s Los Angeles, forming unexpected friendships, and grappling with small-town Wyoming, Indigenous Kachin environmental activists in Myanmar, Muslim American families of hate crime victims, cultural stewards of First Nations and Pasifika, a Sri Lankan British filmmaker’s personal meditation on family, memory, identity, violence, and love, a Taiwanese American filmmaker probing her family about the ramifications of the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949, and the tale of a single woman in the Turkic Uyghur Region.
Shorts programs showcase even more voices under the themes of animation, horror, intimacy (e.g. sisters struggling with addiction and mental health during a trip through the American South, and a mother-daughter relationship challenged by sex work, teen pregnancy, and abortion), spirituality, the social and emotional landscape of gender, food systems and politics (e.g. Northern Iranian chef Hanif Sadr, Indigenous people in the Texas Gulf Coast threatened by SpaceX developments, Punjabi Sikh meatpackers in the Central Valley of California, cross-cultural friendships made while hunting for wild hogs in the Arkansas Ozarks), and Asian American and Pacific Islander trailblazers (e.g. Asian American ballet pioneer George Lee, a person who comes out as transgender at age 60, Thai American U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth, Verona Sagato-Mauga, first Samoan to receive a U.S. legislative seat).
Showcases include Hong Kong cinema (All Shall Be Well, about a lesbian dealing with legalities after the death of her partner, and The Lyricist Wannabe, about a an aspiring Cantopop songwriter) and voices of the Pacific (seven films about Aboriginal activist in 1970s Australia, the Hōkūle’a Polynesian voyaging canoe, a budding makeup artist visited in dreams by Papua New Guinean ancestors, a diasporic Kānaka tracing her identity, a young Papua New Guinean/Australian man torn between crime and reclamation of heritage, a Hawaiian-German Mormon family’s visit to California’s Tikiland in the 1960s, and Patrick Palomo, bringing CHamoru language into jazz music with his group Tradewinds).
Centerpieces of the festival include Q, a film by 2020 CAAM Fellow Jude Chenab about the influences of a clandestine matriarchal religious order in Lebanon on three generations of women in his family, and Girls Will Be Girls, about coming of age in a strict girls’ boarding school in the Himalayas.
The closing night film on Saturday, May 18, will be And So It Begins, a CAAM-funded documentary capturing democratic warriors like Leni Robredo who ran for president against Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Rappler’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa, and more toward the end of the Rodrigo Duterte administration in the Philippines in 2022.
As promised, the full schedule also includes elements of food, music, and ideas in addition to films. The food program includes showings of the documentary Earth Seed: A People’s Journey of Radical Hospitality and six short films under the Ecologies of Sustenance program, and culinary events highlighting Malaysian and Singaporean (tickets, $100, here) and Iranian cuisine (tickets, $60, here) and their chefs’ stories.
Asian Americans highlighted in the musical offerings are a documentary about arts and activist Nobuko Miyamoto, who spent time in a camp during the U.S.’s World War II era internment of ethnically Japanese people and free, open-to-the-public performance at Yerba Buena Gardens by Vietnamese American musician Thảo Nguyễn, who went solo after years leading the rock band Thao & the Get Down Stay Down. Nikbo, a Filipina American Third Culture artist and songwriter born in Morocco and raised in Malawi, Canada, and Kazakhstan before settling in the Bay, will be the opening act.
The ideas portion of CAAMFest 2024 consists of a three-day, completely free CAAM Filmmaker Summit held at an expanded Industry Hub at Four One Nine Gallery community studio and creative agency in San Francisco and supported by Comcast NBCUniversal, the Asian American Documentary Network (A-Doc), Jessie Cheng Charitable Foundation, Film SF | San Francisco Film Commission, Firelight Media, ITVS, and American Documentary + WORLD.
From Friday, May 10 through Sunday, May 12, the summit will use panel, showcase, breakout session, working lunch, and a fireside chat formats to facilitate discussions about representing familial relationships in film, fundraising for projects, collaborating beyond the creative team, increasing community impact as independent Asian and Pacific Islander filmmakers, and breaking into Hollywood.
“The Industry Hub at CAAMFest reflects our roots in nurturing Asian American storytellers, including our 2024 Fellows and filmmakers whose projects we support on the path to public media and beyond,” said CAAM executive director Stephen Gong.
In a category of its own is a special event called How We Thrive: Asian American Healing. The two-hour panel begins at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 16 at the KQED headquarters and tackles the complexities of Asian American mental health issues and holistic solutions. Bay Area
Journalist Cecilia Lei will mediate a discussion between licensed therapist and Korean American Soo Jin Lee of the Yellow Chair Collective, healing practitioner Angela Basbas Angel descended from the Indigenous Bontoc and Ibaloi tribes of Igorot, Philippines, and community activist, author and filmmaker Satsuki Ina, with Asian American artists and creatives. Tickets for the in-person event, $15, are available here. RSVPs to the live-streamed version with a suggested donation of $5 or $10, donation, are available here.
Regular film screenings are $15, with $2 discounts for students, seniors, and persons with disabilities. CAAMFest 2024 runs through Sunday, May 19.
AsAmNews is published by the non-profit, Asian American Media Inc. Follow us on Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support our efforts to produce diverse content about the AAPI communities. We are supported in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library in partnership with the California Department of Social Services and the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs as part of the Stop the Hate program. To report a hate incident or hate crime and get support, go to CA vs Hate.
