Asian-American Film Fest Grows Into 4-Week Affair

In 1978 the Asian-American International Film Festival was little more than a weekend affair at the Henry Street Settlement House in lower Manhattan.

Today the festival is a four-week, three-borough marathon. Its menu of films has grown, and so has its scope, reflecting an expanding Asian-American universe, with films ranging from a portrait of an aspiring Chinese-American prizefighter in Los Angeles to a tale of Korean-American rappers in Seattle.

The festival, sponsored by Asian Cinevision in New York City, includes more than 50 short, documentary and feature films from Asia, Canada and the United States.

Some of them are not directly about Asians at all. Others pluck stories from the Asian diaspora: Clara Law’s “Floating Life” centers on a Hong Kong Chinese tea merchant’s journey to Australia, while Anne Marie Fleming, a Canadian, talks with the ghost of her Chinese grandfather in the documentary-style “Automatic Writing.”

And they are no longer just tales about the trauma of immigration to the United States, nor are they set in such archetypal Asian immigrant enclaves as San Francisco’s Chinatown. An example of this new, broader approach is “My America … or Honk If You Love Buddha,” a documentary by Renee Tajima-Pena.

“My America” is a diary of Ms. Tajima-Pena’s rambling road trip across the United States. In it she explores her own growing consciousness of what it means to be an American. Along the way she meets a cast of Asian-American characters: a Beat poet from Chinatown in San Francisco, a pair of Korean-American rappers in Seattle who muse on Asian-American male sexuality, and a Japanese-American woman who emerged from internment during World War II and devoted her life to the civil-rights movement.

Tajima-Pena’s mother was herself detained in an internment camp during World War II, while her father served in the U.S. Army.

In this year’s selections the voice of a new generation of AsianAmericans is heard loud and clear. It is the voice of young people who grew up on a diet of multiculturalism and who question the stereotypes of Asians in American movies.

There is, for instance, the feature film “Sunsets,” about three young men - white, Latino and Asian - who cruise, steal and nurse their slacker angst one summer in Watsonville, Calif. There is Chris Chan Lee’s first feature, “Yellow,” about middle-class Korean-American teen-agers in Los Angeles, worrying about parents, love and cash.

“Diego Stories” is about a Filipino teen-ager contending with his insecurity over dating a white woman. “Bao” is about a Chinese-American boy who wants to be a professional boxer and who battles most fiercely with his gambler-father.