Balancing Acts of Heritage, Identity

Timothy Linh Bui’s heart-tugging “Green Dragon” opens the VC FilmFest: the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film & Video Festival tonight at 7:30 at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood.

Long a major event in the local film calendar, the festival runs through May 24 at the DGA and at the Village at Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 N. McCadden Place in Hollywood, and the Japan American Theater, 244 S. San Pedro St. in Little Tokyo. VC FilmFest closes May 24 in Little Tokyo with a 7:30 p.m. screening of John Korty’s 1976 landmark TV film “Farewell to Manzanar,” a powerful drama about a Japanese American family faced with internment after the outbreak of World War II. The festival is sponsored by Visual Communications, the Asian Pacific American media arts organization.

Set at Camp Pendleton in 1975 shortly before the fall of Saigon, “Green Dragon” focuses on two small children, a boy, Minh (Trung Nguyen), and his little sister Anh (Jennifer Tran), who have arrived with their uncle, Tai Tran (Don Duong). They are part of the exodus of some 134,000 Vietnamese immigrants housed temporarily at Pendleton and other hastily assembled refugee camps. Bui co-produced and co-wrote the memorable “Three Seasons,” directed by his brother, Tony, who in turn is “Green Dragon’s” co-writer and producer.

Saigon-born Timothy Bui was 5, roughly Minh’s age, when he arrived in the U.S. Growing up in the Silicon Valley, where his parents eventually ran a video store, would have a profound influence on his life. “Green Dragon” expresses the wrenching experience at Camp Pendleton with the kind of comprehensiveness and detail that come only from firsthand experience.

Having been a translator for the U.S. Army, Tai swiftly becomes a linchpin figure at the camp, a humane, intelligent and reflective man who forms a strong, though sometimes inevitably strained, working relationship with the camp commander, Staff Sgt. Jim Lance (Patrick Swayze), an equally decent and conscientious man.

The resolve of these two men will be constantly challenged because the refugees, beyond their common bond of having fled their cherished homeland, have their own set of personal issues. Minh and Anh long for their mother, and Tai can only hope his sister made it out of Saigon. Minh is befriended by a camp cook (Forest Whitaker), who has an amazing amount of free time to devote to Minh and to painting a vast mural in honor of the refugees. (That Whitaker’s kindly Addie is ailing needlessly adds more tears to a film that has more than its share.) Tai in turn is drawn to Thuy Hoa (Hiep Thi Li), the beautiful but embittered general’s daughter. The entire cast is impressive, but it is Duong and Swayze, both excellent, who carry the picture.

A compelling consciousness-raiser of trenchant artistry, Amy Chen’s “The Chinatown Files” (DGA Sunday at 2:15 p.m.) is a superb documentary, a triumph of organization, research and clarity that reveals the horrific impact of the McCarthy era upon the Chinese American community.

Steeped in archival footage, of newsreel and home movie variety, Chen’s film evokes a parallel postwar America, at once familiar and a bit exotic, of Chinatowns. Their inhabitants by and large were supportive of the Chinese Communist Revolution, not because they were communists, but because they were far more aware than most other Americans that Chiang Kai-shek and his KMT party, so fervently supported during World War II, were riddled with corruption. Destined to be disillusioned, they still were hopeful that the rise of Chairman Mao might actually mean that China at last would be run by a government of the people.

Members of progressive organizations such as the Mun Ching (Chinese American Democratic Youth League) in San Francisco and the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (CHLA) were swiftly targeted by the FBI as pro-Communist organizations; indeed, members of the CHLA were jailed for violating the Trading With the Enemy Act for merely sending money home to their families in China. Chen’s interviewees reveal their experiences as victims of the witch hunts and thus add another illuminating chapter to one of America’s darkest eras.

The festival is enlivened by two good-natured comedies dealing with conflicts between tradition-minded immigrant parents and their rebellious offspring, who see themselves as Americans first and are as responsive to pop culture as any other groups of young people. Anurag Mehta’s “American Chai” (DGA, Friday at 10 p.m.) stars Mehta’s brother Aalok as an Indian American college student whose comically strict father (veteran Indian actor Paresh Rawal) plans a medical career and an arranged marriage for his son, whose main interest is pursuing rock ‘n’ roll stardom.

The Filipino American family of Rod Pulido’s “The Flip Side” (DGA, Saturday at 7 p.m.) is more relaxed than the Indian American family of “American Chai,” but its two sons and daughter are on a collision course with their parents and, to an extent, each other. Darius Delacruz (Verwin Gatpandan) has decided to embrace his ancestral Filipino culture to the hilt, while his brother Davis (Jose Saenz), a height-challenged NBA team hopeful, emulates African American teens in style and speech. Their sister Marivic (Ronalee Par) carries on like a self-absorbed Valley girl.

Fatimah Tobing Rony’s standout “Everything in Between” screens Monday at 7 p.m. at the Village at Ed Gould Plaza as part of a program of shorts titled “Body and Soul; a Gaysian Perspective.” So assured and astute is Rony’s 25-minute film, which served as her master’s thesis at UCLA, she clearly has what it takes to develop it into a feature or, for that matter, create an entirely different feature-length project.

Rony makes maximum use of every second of her running time to create a striking portrait of a beautiful young fashion designer (Sierra Knolle), raised in downtown L.A. by her gay uncle (Rodney Kageyama). In the wake of a string of dead-end romances, she falls in love with her best friend (Burt Bulos), a former classmate who is dashingly handsome but also gay. Knolle’s Rosa works through her relationships with Bulos’ Michael and also her uncle in L.A.’s vivid gay Asian Pacific community. (213) 680-4462.

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Writer-director Curtis Hanson hosts the second installment of the UCLA Film Archives’ “The Movie That Inspired Me,” which kicks off Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with “Being John Malkovich” screenwriter Charlie Kaufman presenting his choice, Tom Noonan’s 1994 “What Happened Was . . . ,” (310) 206-FILM.

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“Flesh and the Devil” (1927), a silent classic, remains famous as an instance of a real-life romance between stars--in this case Greta Garbo and John Gilbert--heightening the intensity of their on-screen love scenes. It screens at the Silent Movie Theatre, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. only. 611 N. Fairfax Ave., (323) 655-2520.