Dislocation Dominant Theme of Asian American Festival

The third annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific American International Film Festival, in its most ambitious offering to date, commences tonight at 8 in UCLA’s Melnitz Theater, preceded by a reception in the lobby. The festival, which continues in the Melnitz on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday May 19, 21 and 22, was coordinated by Claire Aguilar of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Abraham Ferrer of Visual Communications, the Asian-American media arts center.

In the films screening through Sunday (those previewed, in any case), the predominant theme is dislocation.

Indeed, the opening attraction--Felicia Lowe’s powerfully understated 45-minute “Carved in Silence”--calls attention to the blatantly racist ordeal to which Chinese attempting to emigrate to America were routinely subjected in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, enforced through 1943--the only time in U.S. history a group of people were almost entirely excluded from entry solely on the basis of race. As three older naturalized Chinese-Americans recall their Kafka-esque experiences at San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island, Lowe deftly re-creates events at the now long-tranquil base.

Also screening tonight is Rita La Doux, Kathleen Laughlin and Nancy Haley’s informative, though lamentably flat and academic 43-minute “Great Branches, New Roots” (1983), which shows how the deep sense of extended family is helping to sustain a large settlement of Hmong refugees in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Michael Uno’s 30-minute “Emi” (1978), one of the many Thursday evening offerings, is a low-key yet heart-wrenching study of an attractive, eloquent Japanese-American named Emi Tanooka, long a Philadelphia resident, who decides to visit her birthplace (Bainbridge Island, Wash.) for the first time in 37 years. However, accompanied by her older daughter, she finds she must first confront her long-suppressed feelings about her incarceration at Manzanar, today a desert waste at the foot of Mt. Whitney with precious few remnants of the World War II camp that once housed 10,000 people. “Emi” has a gentle, evocative score by Dan Kuramoto, whose family was also at Manzanar.

Also screening Thursday is Lori Tsang’s “ ‘Chinaman’s’ Choice,” a poignant, highly impressionistic portrait, more memoir than documentary, of Tsang’s father Alfred, a patrician, New York-born, Canton-raised man who made five B-29 bombing raids over Tokyo alone. Ensconced in suburban, All-American comfort in Bloomington, Ind., Tsang pere , at once bitter and grateful toward the United States, still feels he’s “a man without a country.”

Keith Lock’s delightful 25-minute “A Brighter Moon” kicks off Saturday’s program at 7:30. This is a perfectly realized vignette involving two very different young Hong Kong students in Toronto, roommates who learn to forge a friendship. We take immediately to the serious Mikey (William Koon), but it’s the fun-loving, corner-cutting Valentine (Ken Yan) who is full of surprising self-knowledge.

Sunday brings a revival of Kidlat Tahimik’s 1981 “The Perfumed Nightmare,” a work of folk art rich in wit and imagination that is part travelogue, part ethnographic documentary and part autobiography. A rural Filipino, Tahimik (who was born Eric de Guia) dreams of going to America to become an astronaut but winds up in France and Bavaria, his journey becoming a satire on the evils of colonialism. Crammed with provocative references and juxtapositions, “The Perfumed Nightmare” can hold its own with the cinema’s best surrealist allegories.

Also screening Sunday is Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon’s “First Moon: Celebration of the Chinese New Year,” a cheerful, warmhearted account of how an otherwise drab agricultural community 400 miles southwest of Beijing bursts into colorful merry-making as it stages a traditional 15-day New Year’s celebration.

Sunday will also bring “The Last Emperor,” not Bertolucci’s but a 1986 Hong Kong version centering on the last years of Pu Yi.

For full schedule: (213) 680-4462, 206-8013.