San Diego Asian Film Festival Kicks Off 19th Year

This is KPBS midday edition I'm Maureen Cavanagh the San Diego Asian Film Festival serves up film and food at the San Diego Natural History Museum for its opening tonight. Hey KPBS arts reporter Beth Accomando speaks with artistic director Ryan who to get a preview of the festivals 19th annual event Brian we are coming up on the 19th annual San Diego Asian Film Festival and I am thrilled to see that your opening and closing night films deal with family and food. This is a great combo. Asians love food and families is a big part of our lives. But we also recognize that I think we live in a golden age of food discourse. People love talking about food and we want to borrow people's adventurousness when it comes to food to their adventurousness about film and what better way to do that than to pass them food movies. And so you're opening night film is a Korean one little forest a little forest was a surprise hit the box office in Korea this year started by Jim subarea who has for many years been the most prominent woman director in Korea. And she's not very well known internationally and we think that's a shame. So not only are we letting her with this film or playing one of her classic films the day after. So it's really a way to spot her. But this food component to us is significant because we don't want our audiences just to watch these movies and say oh this is a culture far away. That there is a way that we as San Diego can immediately get the excitement that is delivered in the film through for instance local restaurants local restaurants might not have the kinds of foods that are being portrayed in the film because the food is in there are rather exotic if you will I mean look they're there they're not food you would normally get at a Korean restaurant. So we challenged local restaurant tours to say hey can you what can you make that's inspired by the food in the film but localize it and make it significant to us in San Diego. The ingredients we have here and they love that challenge too. And then you're closing night. One is Japanese so Rahmon shop kind of gives you this cross cultural thing because it's not strictly Japanese food and that started by one of Singapore's great contemporary directors and he was commissioned by a Japanese institution to say hey let's make a film about Singaporean and Japanese friendship. And once again we think about friendship across cultures somehow food just reminds us of how we can shed a lot of the baggage whether it's cultural baggage or in this case a lot of strange colonial imperialistic baggage from Japan in World War II. And to think about families that have crossed both nations and hand how food can remind us of families we left behind family members we didn't know as well. Uncle. John you teach me how to cook books. I want to bring back to Japan. And we can seek Happy Endings through being able to eat together. And I think that's something a lot of people can identify with your home base for the festival is the ultra Star Cinema. But you are doing the Taiwan showcase over at UCSD what can people expect from that. Yeah UCSD we are doing our talent showcase once again we bring a filmmaker all the way from Taiwan to what we're doing differently in UCSD where their talent showcase this year is we realize that first of all that people don't necessarily get the movie theaters anymore and you're missing out on an important communal aspect to watching movies. But I think it's also because technology change there's new ways of telling stories through new media. So we decided actually to invite to virtual reality short films from Taiwan. So we're gonna have those installations at UCSD and they're free for anybody who happens to be on campus. There 10 minute short films that can use new technologies to poke fun at tradition and poke fun at culture and history and looking at town anew. So that's something that's brand new for us and I think it will be a fun addition to our town showcase at UCSD. You brought up technology. You have one film that has me greatly intrigued Detective Dee in 3-D. So martial arts in 3-D seems something marvelous that I can't believe I haven't experienced yet. So you how did you come across this and decided to play it in full disclosure. So this is a film that's started by Troy Horak one of the greatest action directors of all time. This film actually has come out in LA JOLLA in a 2D version. I'm sitting in the theater thinking this movie is missing a certain point. It seems to be designed for additional dimensions. There's a sudden certain certain sense of fun that's being flattened here and then I do some research on it and this one was designed for 3-D. We as Americans never got that version. And what's intriguing is I think in the U.S. every 30 years or so Hollywood says that 3-D is going to save the industry. And it goes goes away. And right now I think we're on the tail end of 3-D in the U.S. but in China where there are building theaters every single day and there's a lot of money and theatrical 3-D has been a big part of how the final box of snuff box office numbers kind of pan out. So if you are a artist like Troy Harch you can actually make the case that it give you more money. Give me more resources to do something that no one has ever seen in 3D. And Detective is such an example of that although this is not in 3-D. You are bringing back Mistri kungfu Theater which tends to leap off the screen no matter what and this is coming back. And can you reveal the format if not the title. Yes. I mean I like that we're thinking about 3-D and then this mystery Theater series that we do every year which is we bring a film out from the vaults and it's usually some kind of old school martial arts film. And I can reveal it is supposed to be on 16 millimeter which we don't see very very much anymore in fact that Peter was showing it in does not have 60 millimeter projection. So we're bringing our own Zakout reveal the film for the country or the or what it's about. But I can say it evokes the spirit of why we love movies to begin with with our festival we want to highlight new directions in cinema but also honor the reason we came out to films to begin with. And Mr. KMF with kind of the perfect way in which you do that I can't urge people enough to experience this it is so much fun. You break down the festival in two sections and this is a way for people who maybe aren't familiar with coming to the festival to kind of hone in on stuff that they might like to describe what these sections are and what people might be able to expect from them. Yeah we definitely think about our festival as it's like four festivals in one Asian cinema. How can you possibly steal one festival to capture everything so we recognize their different sensibilities people go to film festivals for different reasons. If you just want to go to parties and eat the food at the special presentation section is for that a lot of our audiences. They are the Kunder festival because many are Asian American. They've never seen images of themselves on the big screen. As a leading protagonist so we have an entire section dedicated to Asian Americans on screen. There are some people who just want to see you know what are the big films in Asia like what are the box office champions. We have a section called Asia pop which is for more popular sensibility. We have rom coms from Thailand or action films from Korea and then there are the films by the great directors of the world. Regardless of your nationality and a lot of those films never make it to the United States or don't make it to San Diego a prime example of that is the new film by Hirokazu Koryta called shoplifters which just won the Cannes Film Festival the most prestigious film festival in the world. This year the top prize went to a Japanese film and it's called shoplifters and this is where you'll find that that film in our masters section. And then lastly our discovery section. This is just for the weird quirky stuff just voices that are you've never quite seen on the screen before the experiments experiments and documentary and fiction short films long films. It's also where we can really hone in on new artistic voices but also new kinds of stories that aren't being told anywhere in the world. That was San Diego Asian Film Festival artistic director Brian who's speaking with Beth Accomando. Check out Beths cinema Junkie podcast today with more about the festival's offerings. The festival runs tonight through November 17th.