For Filmmakers, Asian American Film Fest Is a Homecoming

Tony Bui’s first feature film has taken him from the tropics of Vietnam, where he wrapped production, to the thin mountain air of Park City, Utah, where he won top prizes in this country’s premiere independent film festival.

But for the 26-year-old director, it is a local film event that has finally brought his work home. Bui’s “Three Seasons,” which won three awards at this year’s Sundance Film Festival--including the Grand Jury Prize for feature film--was scheduled to open the 17th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival on Thursday night.

“It holds a very special meaning for me to go to the Bay Area,” said Bui, who grew up in nearby Sunnyvale and lives in Los Angeles. In 1996, the director screened his student short “Yellow Lotus” at the festival. “I have a lot of anticipation about screening there. It’ll be the first time my parents will get to see the film, the first time a lot of my high school friends and my mentors will get to see the film.”

Bui’s story appears to be more the norm than the anomaly at this year’s Asian American film festival, the largest of its kind in the country. Several spotlighted films, rather than being ghettoized as Asian American or Asian works, have already demonstrated mainstream appeal, most notably at Sundance. Their directors either live or grew up in the Bay Area, pointing to the region’s burgeoning independent filmmaking scene. Those facts, along with serendipitous programming, mean that this year’s weeklong festival has become a sort of homecoming for auteurs and films that have already enjoyed some success out in the world.

Four of the festival’s major films--two documentaries and two fiction works--screened at Sundance and picked up five awards among them. Barbara Sonneborn’s “Regret to Inform,” about war widows confronting the Vietnam conflict, has also received an Academy Award nomination for feature documentary. These and other features screening this week grapple with themes of geographic and emotional dislocation. Many involve journeys back to Asia, often in the context of exploring the past, while others address issues of citizenship and identity on domestic soil.

“I think there’s a kind of fluid identity between Asia and America that comes out throughout our festival,” said festival director Brian Lau, who expects to sell more than 13,000 tickets. “It points to a recent phenomenon of diaspora, of more going back and forth between Asia and Asia America.”

Lau attributes this trend in the festival’s films to art reflecting life--an entire generation of Asian Americans whose parents immigrated to the U.S. after 1965 has traveled to Asia to reflect on its familial past. About a third of the 77 films are from Asian-based filmmakers.

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On the domestic front, several of the directors, including the Sundance veterans, received funding from the National Asian American Telecommunications Assn., which runs the festival. For example, Emiko Omori’s “Rabbit in the Moon,” which helped her win a cinematography award at Sundance, received development and finishing funds from the nonprofit group. The documentary about World War II Japanese American internment camps took seven years to complete.

“I think for myself, I had been avoiding this part of my life. But I realized I had to look at what happened during the war,” said Omori, whose family was imprisoned in a camp. “For us, there’s this irrevocable break in the continuity that follows you throughout life.”

Omori also earned her cinematography nod by shooting Sonneborn’s “Regret to Inform.” Sonneborn, whose husband was killed in the 1968 Tet offensive, said she started her first documentary in 1988 to work out her anger at war and its makers. The project took her to Vietnam for seven weeks in 1992, when she talked with Vietnamese widows and visited the killing fields where her husband and other soldiers died.

“I set out to create a powerful antiwar film. I wanted to create a film that recognizes the suffering of the other,” Sonneborn said. “I think that when you lose somebody you love, it doesn’t matter what the politics are, you suffer. And so the loneliness of the loss, the worrying of what the children are going to do, the tremendous need to communicate that war is a waste and we shouldn’t do it is something the Vietnamese and American women wanted to do.”

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Two other featured works--Bui’s “Three Seasons,” which opens April 30 at selected theaters in Los Angeles, and M. Trinh Nguyen’s “Tiger’s Apprentice”--involve journeys back to Vietnam. Nguyen, also a Bay Area native, traveled there to document her great-uncle’s folk-medicine practice, a healing art dying with the country’s modernization. And Bui’s film, three intertwined stories inspired by visits to his birth country, is the first American feature shot in Vietnam.

“I saw this incredible humanity, this incredible life that I had not experienced growing up, that I had not seen in these American movies,” Bui said of his trips to Vietnam. “I got to see a very universal spirit, and that’s what really struck me. The place was filled with hope.”

Ruby Yang is another Bay Area filmmaker who returned to her birthplace to shoot her first feature-length work. “Citizen Hong Kong,” a documentary scheduled to close the festival, follows the lives of five Hong Kong youths in the year after the former British colony was handed over to China. Yang, who worked as editor on “AKA Don Bonus” and “Street Soldiers,” weaves video diary footage from the youths into her family’s story of moving to and leaving Hong Kong.

The result reveals a city-state constantly in the throes of transition, battered by the political winds of China, but also reinvigorated by waves of immigration. Yang said she sees Hong Kong as a metaphor for the modern world, one where people are in flux, borders hold little meaning and home becomes a portable concept. In fact, a line from her film--”fallen leaves return home”--could serve as an overarching slogan for the festival filmmakers and their works.

“I’m very interested in people being displaced, because these days you don’t know where your home is,” Yang said. “Even though my subjects aren’t from here, I think a lot of people can identify with their experience, the experience of being an immigrant.”

For his first feature, local playwright Philip Kan Gotanda chose not to return to Asia or explicitly explore his Japanese heritage. Instead, “Life Tastes Good,” which screened in noncompetition at Sundance, follows a dying mobster as he returns home to San Francisco. But the film, which takes place almost entirely in a Potrero Hill warehouse, is as evocative a portrait of home as any of the other works.

“There just is something about coming to the Bay Area,” Gotanda said. “I think there’s a particular aesthetic, but I think it’s dangerous when you try to articulate it.”

In fact, with its landscape populated entirely by Asian American characters, from police to hoodlums to office workers, the film reflects a city--and a country--confronting a multiplicity of race and class perspectives. It is a world that may seem both familiar and alien to those living in the region. Gotanda’s film expresses a common sentiment among the festival programmers and returning filmmakers--that while homecomings can be comforting, home remains an elusive and ever-shifting concept.