The 31st edition of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival is going to be a little different than previous years’ celebrations. More than half of its feature lineup could be its own Asian-American film festival, something that rarely happens at the internationally flavored event.
“We have 17 feature documentaries and narratives that are Asian-American out of 32 total, and that’s kind of unusual,” festival co-director David Magdael says. “We’re seeing an uptick in Asian-American cinema. Our community makes a lot of shorts (there are 102 of those in this year’s festival), but 17 features is a high number.
“And a lot of those are based in L.A.,” Magdael points out.
The festival opens Thursday night at Little Tokyo’s Aratani Theatre with the world premiere of Wong Fu Productions’ first feature, “Everything Before Us.” Directors Wesley Chan, Ted Fu and Philip Wang, whose Wong Fu YouTube channels have more than 2.4 million subscribers, made the romance with the first microbudget production grant from Visual Communications, the Downtown L.A.-based Asian media arts support organization that puts on the festival.
The festival’s centerpiece and closing-night features, “Ktown Cowboys” and “Margarita, With a Straw,” also were made by U.S.-based filmmakers.
A big-screen version of the popular Web series about a bunch of buddies carousing around Koreatown, “Ktown Cowboys” makes its West Coast premiere Saturday.
“The festival provides an outlet for filmmakers that, maybe, won’t necessarily get an outlet,” says “Ktown Cowboys” director and co-creator Daniel Park, who previously showed the first season of his all-amateur webisodes at the festival. “The best thing, though, is that the festival has a genuine sense of community,” Park said. “They try to foster better filmmakers and create an environment for film lovers and people who are interested in the industry to be able to grow.”
With the widely debated ABC series “Fresh Off the Boat” and an increase in Asian faces on U.S. television this year, not to mention the multicultural success of “Fast and Furious” blockbusters directed by Justin Lin and James Wan, Magdael sees that growth taking shape in Hollywood.
He just hopes Hollywood really sees it now.
“You know, the key word this year is diversity, right?” Magdael says with some irony. “For us, call it normalcy. We’re doing panel discussions on Saturday and Sunday at the festival with all of the different guilds, and rather than say we’re celebrating diversity, we’re talking about celebrating normalcy because no longer can Hollywood say ‘There aren’t enough of you who can write, direct or act.’ ”
Hard as this may be for Americans to understand, though, it’s not just about us. The festival also will screen films from 19 other countries, including features from Vietnam (the dystopian future drama “2030”), People’s Republic of China (documentary “The Chinese Mayor”), Japan (ultraviolent crime thriller “The World of Kanako”), The Philippines (lighthearted crowd-pleasers “That Thing Called Meant-to-Be” and “Where I Am King”) and the latest from both established and up-and-coming filmmakers out of Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia and Malaysia.
“Sometimes we’ll go after a larger name, but we also want to break some of the new directors that you don’t necessarily hear about,” Magdael explains. “Our choices aren’t for lack of getting, oh I don’t know, Wong Kar-wai’s next film or something like that. It’s more like what’s going to make sense for rounding out what our audience might go to see. And we like veterans, but we like to bring new filmmakers from Asia to the forefront.”
All of which makes the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival a vital thing for the region and the world.
“L.A. is a good place for a festival like this, because if you take a look at what we call the local Asian-American community, we’re all here,” Magdael says. “There’s Filipino Town, Koreatown, Thai Town, Little Saigon, Little Tokyo, Chinatown … and you’ve got the South Asian Indian folks that are out here, too. So it’s a perfect place for us to celebrate our whole pan-Asian community.
“And the festival is really reflective of the talented storytellers who are available here, and the people who perform in their films. We’ve got actors, actresses, writers, directors; we’ve got people in front of and behind the camera. We’ve got people in all different parts of the entertainment industry, which makes L.A. the perfect place for this film festival to be.”
