Tuesday, April 30, 2024
CAAMFest 2024
Formerly known as the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, CAAMFest 2024 will take place this year May 9-19 with films, food, music, and ideas during the Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Presented by the Center for Asian American Media, the festival has provided a platform to tell stories that convey the richness and diversity of Asian American experiences for more than four decades, even though it's now on a much smaller scale than it used to be.
This year's festival has 14 documentary features and 12 narrative features, in addition to 6 shorts programs, a slight increase from last year's 40th anniversary edition.
The festival's film selections will be screened over two weekends, at SFMOMA, the Roxie and the Great Star Theater in San Francisco, then the last Sunday at the New Parkway Theater in Oakland.
"The division over affirmative action reflects a really deep and old conflict about what equality means that everyone is treated the same, or equality demands that people be treated differently in order to produce equality."That division will surely remain unresolved in the foreseeable future.
Even though people already know the results of that election, which marks the return to power of the Marcos family, the film follows the Vice President Leni Robredo's campaign with a high hope. In the Philippines, the President and the Vice President are elected separately, and the Vice President Leni Robredo has been the opposition to the President Duterte who has been regarded by the West as an autocrat.
With the Nobel Peace Prize winner, journalist Maria Ressa often appearing in front of the camera, the film underlines the urgency to fight the misinformation, and it portrays Leni Robredo to be the hope for respecting free press and the truth. However, the film did little to establish the why, and by the end of the film, we still know little about Leni as a politician, and even less about her opposition. It doesn't explain why the election is at such a high stake instead of being a routine election.
The film does capture the energetic grassroots campaign by Leni's working-class supporters, but it fails to allow us to know any individual supporter, and why they were so enthusiastically campaigning for Leni. Compared to the director Ramona Diaz's impressive previous work, this film is a little disappointing, even though not as much as the election result.
The three victims are 23-year-old Deah Barakat, Deah's newlywed wife, 21-year-old Yusor Abu-Salha, and Yusor's 19-year-old sister Razan Abu-Salha. On February 10, 2015, the property owner Craig Hicks came to their door and shot the three promising young students to death in cold blood, then he calmly told the police during the investigation that because of his hot temper, he killed the three because of an ongoing parking space dispute.
The killing shocked the nation and the world, and devastated the Muslim community. Four years later, the shooter was sentenced to life in prison for murder, but he was not charged with a hate crime by either the federal or the state government.
The film clearly establishes the nature of the murder to be a hate crime, but even more movingly, it tells us who these three victims were and how terrible their beautiful lives were senselessly cut short. It demonstrates how important as a society, we need to unite to fight against hate crimes and intolerance.
Given the current war in Gaza and the widespread protests in universities against the indifference toward the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza, this timely film reminds us how important it is to stand up against Islamophobia.
The director Vicky Du starts from the generation of her grandparents. Her grandma tells her how she was forced into a marriage with a soldier who fled mainland China to Taiwan in 1949. Du then makes her mom reflect on her own marriage on camera. She also talks to her brother about his mental health issue. As if no one can be spared in her extended family, even if some just appear in the film only through the letters they wrote, she paints an impressive family portrait with deep emotions and detailed closeups.
Du travels between Taiwan and her parents' home in New Jersey, and tries to sort out the cultural difference and its impact on each generation, and how it affects her own queer identity. Even though the stories she candidly shares are deeply personal, they are also quite universal in many ways for a lot of immigrants. Having seen the film, you may begin to wonder what your own family story is behind each photo in your parents' albums.
During a mid-autumn festival gathering, Pat and Angie cook a feast and we are introduced to Pat's delightful extended family. Pat's brother Shing (Tai-Bo) works night-shifts at a parking lot and his wife Mei (So-ying Hui) works at a hotel cleaning rooms. They have two grown children. Their daughter Fanny (Fish Liew) raises two young children in a rat infested cramped apartment and their son Victor (Chung-Hang Leung) is desperately looking for a place he can afford to start his own family. They all love Auntie Pat and Auntie Angie as their own family members, and the two often offer generous help to the working class family.
But Angie and Pat's happiness is abruptly ended when Pat unexpectedly dies in her sleep at the age of 70 without a will. Based on Hong Kong's law, because Angie's name is not on the deed, Pat and Angie's apartment now goes to Pat's brother Shing. Not only Angie has to deal with the tremendous grief of losing a lifelong partner, but she also faces the reality that she might lose the home she has shared with Pat for over 30 years.
After telling a story of two elderly gay men in his previous film "Twilight's Kiss" (叔叔 2019), the writer-director Ray Yeung now turns his lens to an elderly lesbian couple. While he reveals the cruel reality under current law in Hong Kong which doesn't provide protection to same-sex couples, he avoids simplifying the issue and instead portrays a few characters that evokes our sympathy and understanding. None of these characters are bad people, but everyone seems to run into a corner and there is no alternative. You can't help but wonder what you would do if you were in the shoes of each character. The mesmerizing performance by the terrific ensemble cast also makes the story even more devastating to watch.
The film won the well-deserved Best Feature Film of the Teddy Award at this year's Berlin International Film. It also serves as an urgent public announcement: get a living will if you have not done so.
