Films to See at This Year’s Asian American International Film Festival
For 45 years, Asian CineVision has brought together and showcased some of the best Asian, Asian diasporic, and Pacific Islander cinema for the Asian American International Film Festival. Established in 1978 at NYC’s Henry Street Settlement, it is the nation’s first and longest running festival of its kind, hosting films from both established and up-and-coming filmmakers.
This year, in addition to hosting in-person screenings all over NYC from July 26th to August 6th, AAIFF will also be debuting their online screening room. Representing a total of 29 countries, 25 languages, and 111 directors from around the world, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. Here are some events you won’t want to miss:
Rea Tajiri’s latest documentary, Wisdom Gone Wild, presents a new look at dementia as not a portrait of loss, but a wisdom that has “gone wild.” In it, music, singing, art and movement become central vessels of memory and connection. Aided by a palimpsest of home movie footage, photographs and documents–which dazzle in their visual textures and analogue beauty–the film blends time between the past and present, skillfully weaving threads together over its duration.
The film has won the Audience Award (Blackstar Film Festival), the Grand Jury Award (San Diego Asian Film Festival), and the New Cinema Award (Berwick Film and Media Festival). The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Tajiri.
After coming out to her conservative parents, 17-year-old Twinkie takes off on a road trip to meet her online crush with the help of her nerdy best friend, Egghead. As they make their way across the country, Egghead wrestles with his unrequited feelings for Twinkie, while Twinkie learns to embrace her identity as a gay mixed Asian woman.
Told in a series of flashbacks and peppered with vibrant 2D animation, Egghead & Twinkie is a stylized, whip smart, coming-of-age comedy about the joys and pains of coming out of the closet.
A landmark project directed by Robert A. Nakamura and Duane Kubo, Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980) is the first feature-length film made by and about Asian Pacific Americans. Capturing the contributions and hardships of Japanese Americans from the turn of the 20th century, the film centers on Oda, a feisty issei (first generation Japanese American) and elderly single laborer living in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. Through a series of flashbacks, the story traces Oda’s life as a laborer on the transcontinental railroad and his struggle to save the home of Little Tokyo’s residents when the community is threatened with redevelopment.
The film is part of AAIFF’s “Retrospectives in Dialogue” series, bringing filmmakers across generations in conversation with one another by pairing restorations of seminal, older films with contemporary films that explore similar themes. This year’s themes revolve around the relationship between filmmaking and activism and the impact of urban development and gentrification on Asian communities. The screening of Hito Hata: Raise the Banner will be followed by a live Q&A with the filmmakers.