Constructing a Celluloid Bridge Across the Pacific

When the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien introduces his film “Good Men, Good Women” at the opening of the 1996 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film & Video Festival tonight, it will mark something more than a rare public appearance by a noteworthy international filmmaker.

It represents another feather in the cap for a Southern California institution that was on the cutting edge of Asian and Asian American cinema before Gong Li, John Woo, Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar-Wai became household names to cinephiles and magazine readers across the country.

With 23 features, 17 film shorts and 20 videos from more than a dozen countries, the 11th festival is the largest event of its kind in the continental United States. This year’s edition, which runs from Thursday through June 2 at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater and LACMA’s Bing and Brown theaters, boasts seven national, two international and numerous L.A. and West Coast premieres.

The two-week run is a far cry from the festival’s humble beginnings in 1985, when it was more of a low-profile film series, showing mostly independent Asian American work over two weekends.

It didn’t begin to approach its present status until 1988, when the UCLA Film and Television Archive joined forces with the original presenters, the Asian-Pacific American media arts group Visual Communications, and helped bring noteworthy international talent.

In the past year alone, films that made theatrical runs after appearing at the festival include Wong Kar-Wai’s “Chung-king Express,” Mina Shum’s “Double Happiness” and Zhou Xiaowen’s “Ermo.” Art-house launching pad aside, one of the festival’s goals is to bring together Southern California’s Asian American community--a disparate group of approximately 1 million people.

“There is not a monolithic Asian American community,” says Abraham Ferrer of Visual Communications, who, along with UCLA archive programmer Cheng-Sim Lim, directs the festival. “There are many diverse communities, people who have come here under different circumstances. This festival provides a place where we can all share our commonalities.”

For instance, the six-tape “Sticky Steamy Saucy” video program deals with the misrepresentation of Asian American gays in the media, while Michael Cho’s documentary video “Another America” portrays black-Korean relations in Detroit.

The international features are, however, like a series of dispatches from across the ocean. They range from a story about political prisoners in the Philippines (Chito Rono’s “Eskapo”) to one of three runaway children in Thailand (Bhandit Rittakol’s “Once Upon a Time . . . This Morning”), from a hyper-urban Japanese yakuza action picture (Ishii Takashi’s “Gonin”) to a tale about traditional Indonesian court musicians (Garin Nugroho’s “And the Moon Dances”).

Videos and shorts, many by local artists, appear before each feature, keeping the festival in touch with its original indie flavor. In addition to Hou Hsiao-Hsien, whose opening night work is one of five features from Taiwan, several other directors will appear, among them Tran Anh Hung (“Cyclo,” the follow-up to his lavishly praised “The Scent of Green Papaya”) and Trinh T. Minh-ha, best known for the documentary “Surname Viet Given Name Nam,” who’ll be showing her first fiction film, “A Tale of Love.”

One big change from years past is the involvement of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. About half the films will be shown at LACMA’s Bing Theater, which is larger and, festival organizers agree, more centrally located and easily accessible than the Melnitz Theater on the UCLA campus, which will host the rest of the screenings.

Funding to cover the $40,000 budget--about half of what most similarly sized festivals are produced for--is provided by ticket sales and grants from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, among other organizations.

LACMA is helping foot the bill for the opening reception tonight for “Good Men, Good Women,” which has been seen only twice before in the U.S., at screenings in New York and San Francisco.

Lim compares the director’s impact to that of such fifth-generation filmmakers as Zhang and Chen Kaige, who brought world attention to mainland Chinese cinema. “Before Hou Hsiao-Hsien, no one paid any attention to Taiwanese cinema,” she says. “It wasn’t just a backwater--it wasn’t even on anybody’s radar.”

* The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film and Video Festival runs Thursday through June 2 at Bing and Brown theaters, LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6110. Melnitz Theater, UCLA, northeast corner of campus, near intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Hilgard Avenue. (310) 206-FILM.