Gems of the Pacific Rim

Over the past 13 years, the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film and Video Festival has introduced a vast range of films from the Pacific Rim, many of them outstanding--with only a portion of them, unfortunately, receiving subsequent distribution.

The Asian national cinemas are often almost as old as the movies themselves, yet never, except for the Japanese, have they ever had so high a profile. There’s creativity everywhere, especially on Taiwan, which in recent years has produced some of the finest films made anywhere in the world.

Opening tonight at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd., the festival will present 70 individual programs, highlighted by 15 feature films, through next Thursday at the DGA as well as the Japan America Theater in Little Tokyo. The festival starts out on a light note at a 7:30 p.m. gala presentation of Eric Koyanagi’s knockabout comedy “hundred percent,” which features a screenful of talented young Asian American actors playing a varied group of Venice denizens.

Tamlyn Tomita plays an elegant beauty who happens to come into laid-back, immediately smitten Dustin Nguyen’s coffee shop. A funny punker couple (Darion Basco and Keiko Agena), who are into African American lingo and style, fall heir to a sleek lowrider and lots of trouble, while Garrett Wang plays an actor coping with ethnic stereotyping.

The cross-cultural motif continues with Tim Chey’s warm and funny serious comedy “Fakin’ Da Funk” (DGA, Friday at 9 p.m.) The guys on a South-Central L.A. basketball court think a newly arrived Chinese youth, Julian (Dante Basco), is faking his black-inflected speech. In fact, he was adopted by an Atlanta couple at birth. Long widowed, his mother (Pam Grier) has just landed a better job in L.A. and has moved there with him and his younger African American brother Perry (Rashaan Nall).

While Chey reveals the very real prejudices Basco faces and the pressures placed upon Perry to join a drug-dealing gang (run by a suavely sinister Tone-Loc), up pops in the neighborhood an exchange student from China (Margaret Cho). She’s appalled to find that she hasn’t ended up in Beverly Hills with a fellow student.

“Fakin’ Da Funk” rambles a bit, but its heart and sense of humor are always in the right place. The large, capable cast includes Nell Carter, Tatyana Ali and Ernie Hudson.

For his captivating documentary “Kelly Loves Tony” (DGA, Saturday at 7 p.m.), video maker Spencer Nakasako turned over a camcorder to Kelly Saeturn and her boyfriend, Tony Saelio, to record a year and a half in their lives. At 17, Kelly is a bright, pretty Oakland-area resident graduating from high school and looking ahead to college. But earlier she had met Tony, a beefy 24-year-old ex-con, who like her is an Iu Mien refugee from a hill tribe in Laos, and has become pregnant by him.

What emerges is a portrait of an articulate young American woman who is caught between two cultures with conflicting values and priorities. It also suggests that the camcorder has allowed both Kelly and Tony to unload their feelings freely and thereby better communicate with each other. “Kelly Loves Tony” illuminates much in a mere 57 minutes.

As a first-time writer-director, Francisco Aliwalas has a deft touch in his wistful comedy “Disoriented,” in which he stars (DGA, Saturday at 9 p.m.). Set in the lovely old city of Albany, N.Y., a fresh location if there ever was one, “Disoriented” finds Aliwalas’ Filipino American West Cordova at loose ends. Raised by his loving but dominating mother (the wonderful Potri Ranka Manis), West is dutifully but unhappily pursuing a premed course to please his mother.

You quickly understand how his well-meaning but overbearing mother drove her husband away--he hasn’t been heard from for a decade--and her older son. But then, after a four-year absence, West’s football player brother (Wayland Quintero) suddenly turns up at the bus station--in full drag.

What happens next is at once funny and serious, much like “Fakin’ Da Funk” but with considerably more polish. Also featured are the highly effective Jojo Gonzalez, Kayo Takahashi and Sutton Keany.

Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s “Milagros” (DGA, Sunday at noon) is a boldly successful attempt to transform lurid soap opera into a potent tale of sin and redemption. In the title role, Sharmaine Arnaiz plays a beautiful young woman who quits dancing at a small-city bar to become a servant in the household of a landowner in order to pay off her recently deceased, no-good father’s debt. She is under no pressure to do this, but her gesture involves her desire to fulfill her father’s promise to take her to the mountain of Banahaw, regarded in the Philippines as a sacred place attracting pilgrims in search of spiritual enlightenment.

Milagros, who gives freely and lovingly of her sexual favors, finds herself running the household of a widower with three adult sons. In the ensuing stew of sex and religiosity, Diaz-Abaya is able to view all the men in their complexities while Milagros seems increasingly saintly, as contradictory as that sounds, in her spiritual yearning.

The Philippine feature that follows “Milagros” at 2:30 p.m., “Rizal in Dapitan,” is unfortunately a stodgy historical drama about the Philippines’ revolutionary hero Dr. Jose Rizal, a brilliant and courageous intellectual whose extraordinary story could make a great movie.

Lin Cheng-sheng’s “Murmur of Youth” (DGA, Sunday at 9 p.m.) is a thoroughly demanding work, which, if not quite possessing the wallop of other Taiwanese pictures, is nonetheless rewarding. Lin evokes the soullessness of contemporary Taipei as he introduces us to two young women, both named Mei-li, which means “pretty.”

One lives on the edge of town in a humble yet inviting simple brick cottage with her family, which includes her kindly but fading grandmother. The other lives in a high-rise with her family, which pays little attention to her. Both girls are loners full of longing who, some 45 minutes into the film, meet when they each get jobs as cashiers in the box office of a multiplex theater. They wind up, in a moment of desperation, in each other’s arms. “Murmur of Youth” is a somber, subtle work of considerable perception and reflection.

Closing the festival next Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Japan America Theater, 244 S. San Pedro St., is Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting’s “The Soong Sisters,” a sweeping epic tale of the three fabled sisters who have played such a major role in the destiny of 20th century China. Charlie Soong (1866-1918), a clever peasant who made his way to America and returned to China a Christian and built his fortune publishing Chinese Bibles, had four remarkable children.

The focal point is his noble middle daughter, Ching-ling (Maggie Cheung), who married the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen against her father’s wishes--there were limits, it seems, to his expectations. Serving as minister of finance for Sun’s republic was banker and industrialist H.H. Kung--the husband of the practical-minded Ai-ling Soong (Michelle Khan). Heading Sun’s military forces was Gen. Chiang Kai-shek, who in 1927 married Mei-ling Soong (Vivian Wu), who was to become the formidable and eternally glamorous Madame Chiang Kai-shek, now 101.

According to “The Soong Sisters,” the siblings’ love and loyalty for one another survived Chiang’s war on the Communists, with whom Ching-ling cast her lot; the Japanese invasion; World War II; and the 1949 Communist takeover of China, which drove the Chiangs and the Kungs into exile.

Although the film is a conventional bio-epic, it not only provides fine roles for three of Hong Kong’s major stars but also shows how the sisters were strong figures in their own right and no mere reflections of their powerful husbands.

The highlight of the festival’s special events is a tribute Monday at 7 p.m. at the Japan America Theater to the late Toshiro Mifune, international star whose career spanned five decades. On closing night, the festival will present a best film award of $1,500 in honor of the late Hong Kong director King Hu. For festival information: (213) 680-4462; for ticket information: (213) 680-3700.