CAAMFest, formerly known as the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival (Thu/8-Sun/11) has recently played against a political backdrop of rising anti-Asian American hate, stoked by the right wing in the wake of COVID. The stakes feel even higher now, as our current White House wages war against DEI policies in public and private sectors, seems bent on erasing ethnic minorities from the official “American history” narrative, and now pushes to defund PBS, which has long been an important ally to filmmakers of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage… to name just a few among numerous reactionary policies being pursued.
The administration’s stance is that any acknowledgement of cultural or other difference “divides us” as a nation. But it’s quite clear that the real point is to exclude any population or culture outside the white, heterosexual, European-derived ones that have constituted our traditional “mainstream.” Who does that “unite,” beyond the same people who angrily deny “white privilege” is a thing because it works for them?
CAAMFest 2025 provides a counterpoint if not an antidote to that political tide. Though somewhat scaled down from prior editions—running four days rather than sprawling over the usual week and a half—it’s packed with a diverse array of dramatic and nonfiction works from around the world.
Opening night this Thurs/8 sees the festival returning to its longtime home in Japantown, the AMC Kabuki (which hopefully will host more such events in the future, after several years of apparently discouraging them) with a CAAM-funded documentary feature. Tadashi Nakamura’s Third Act is about his father Robert A. Nakamura, who is called “the godfather of Asian American media,” having among other things founded the first such media arts organization (LA-based Visual Communications, still active 55 years later) and made what was purportedly the first ever narrative feature by and about Asian Americans (1980’s Hito Hata: Raise the Banner).
The son of Japanese emigres, Nakamura Senior as a child was among those US citizens forced into WW2 incarceration at Manzanar, and later found political focus through the anti-war and Asian American power movements of the late 1960s and early 70s. After the screening and a filmmaker Q&A, there will be a gala party at the Asian Art Museum. For more on Third Act, see Josh Rotter’s interview with Tadashi Nakamura here.
Four “Centerpiece” selections run a thematic gamut, though notably (if perhaps just coincidentally), nearly all sport unusually meditative, lyrical aesthetic approaches. Vera Brunner-Sung’s Bitterroot is a quietly minimalist fiction whose gorgeous widescreen images take full advantage of the rural Montana setting. Its hero Lue (Wa Yang) is a fly-fishing loner recovering from the collapse of his marriage, while rather relentlessly pressured to find a new wife by his entire Hmong emigre community. Connor Sen Warnick’s world-premiere debut feature Characters Disappearing finds figures equally alienated in the big city, as a racially mixed ensemble of young New Yorkers (including Yuka Murakami and the writer-director as cousins) wander through a cryptic narrative that seems to exist both “now” and in the 1970s.
Equally abstract in its way is Rajee Samarasinghe’s Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, a documentary that has room for striking staged elements. The resulting unclassifiable mix probes lingering wounds left by Sri Lanka’s long-running civil war. That conflict ended in 2009, but its legacy of death, unresolved “disappearances” and mass displacement remains. It’s a poetic essay of sorts with some stunning imagery. A more stylistically straightforward “Centerpiece” nonfiction is Chithra Jeyaram’s Love Chaos Kin, another world premiere. Though it certainly has twists enough content-wise in charting the entire youth—from birth to high school—of twin girls adopted by a well-off Indian emigre couple. But all parties remain in contact with their biological mother, a bipolar, financially struggling Caucasian New Mexican estranged from the Navajo father. If you think your family dynamics are complicated, think again. The principal subjects will be present for a post-screening Q&A on Sun/11.
Elsewhere in CAAM’s 2025 program, there’s a “Pacific Showcase” for two documentaries about environmental and cultural preservation: Jalena Keane-Lee’s Standing Above the Clouds and Virginie Tetoofa’s Te Puna Ora (The Source of Life) both provide portraits of women’s activism to protect ancestral lands from development, in Hawa’ii and Tahiti’s Moorea Island resepectively. Similar ecological themes echo through a sidebar of “Palestinian Landscapes” including Razan Al Salah’s A Stone’s Throw and Jumana Manna’s Foragers, while a screening-with-seminar entitled “Against Amnesia” ties together histories of colonial displacement and resistance in both Palestine (Mike Elsherif’s Maqluba) and Bangladesh (Bengal Memory).
A separate “Hong Kong Cinema Showcase” has one new narrative feature (Riley Yip’s Blossoms Under Somewhere), a new documentary (Dora Choi and Haider Kikabhoy’s To Be Continued), and a revival presentation of Ann Hui’s 1982 Boat People, one of the most important early works of the HK “New Wave.” Its dramatization of Vietnamese refugees’ plight is particularly timely as this year sees the 50th anniversary of the end to the Vietnam War—or the American War, as Vietnamese call it.
That history surfaces also in a very different New Wave, Elizabeth Ai’s doc about the generation of immigrant offspring who formed a teenage Orange County subculture of dance music and fashion-forward enthusiasts in the 1980s. Tony Nguygen’s Year of the Cat charts his search to discover what happened to his father, who vanished amidst the Fall of Saigon half a century ago. Pham Ngoc Lan’s B&W Cu Li Never Cries, which won a prize at the Berlin Fest, likewise weaves together elements from the last half-century of Vietnamese diaspora in its fictive storytelling. Van Tran Nguyen and Alex Derwick’s The Motherload is a more humorous narrative take on related themes, depicting two Vietnamese-American women both exploring their heritage while ridiculing its representation in famous Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War.
Other titles in the program this year include several of particular Bay Area interest, like Luke Yuanyuan Yang’s Chinatown Cha-Cha, about that SF neighborhood’s once-famous nightclub scene and the senior survivors still dancing many decades later. There’s also Jon Osaki & Josh Chuck’s Making Waves: The Rise of Asian America, which looks back at activist movements in the 1970s—which gave birth to ethnic studies curricula in our educational systems—while examining the recent attempts to eradicate that entire academic realm, particularly in Texas. Longtime Bay Area maker Trinh T. Minh-ha will show her most recent work, 2022’s sprawling essayistic inquiry What About China?
Documentary topics further encompass the clash between cultures and commerce when Chinese manufacturers build a vast factory industrial park in economically struggling, politically turbulent East Africa (Made in Ethiopia); the unique Chinese profession of Mistress Dispeller, hired to break up an errant spouse’s affair; Filipinx LGBTQ solidarity in 1990s NYC (Because of You: A History of Kilawin Kolektibo); a Japanese-Canadian photographer who documented the 1960s US Civil Rights Movement (Between Pictures: The Lens of Tamio Wakayama); and Big Apple tenants’ fight against ruthlessly gentrifying real estate magnates (Slumlord Millionaire).
Additional narrative features Softshell, Jinho Myung’s drama about Thai-American siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, and Jerome Woo’s Mongrels, a tale of Korean immigrant disorientation in the very alien new world of a 1991 Canadian prairie town. Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s A Traveler’s Needs is his third collaboration with French superstar Isabelle Huppert. For a walk on the wilder side, there’s Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys, a campy phantasmagoria in which she and Sadie Scott play bisexual sometime sex workers navigating kinks, supernatural curses and serial killers in mythologically midnight-movie-ready Trashtown.
Closing night on Sunday brings Yellow Face, Annette Jolles’ filmed record of David Henry Hwang’s 2007 play, shot during the Broadway run of Leigh Silverman’s revival last fall. It’s an ingenious farce-cum-critique-cum-staged oral history recounting the author’s bumpy stretch about thirty years ago, after he’d had a huge hit with M. Butterfly. High on that success, he’d joined community protests against casting a white actor as a central Vietnamese character in Miss Saigon (another variant on Madame Butterfly), only to suffer second thoughts after some public blowback—and then finding he’s committed the sin of “yellowface” casting himself by unknowingly putting a non-Asian actor in his own new work.
Also drawing on additional autobiographical and satirical elements, this freeform yet tight comedy has just six actors acrobatically inhabiting myriad roles. The only problem with this PBS Great Performances video of the high-octane production is that it’s still scaled for a large auditorium—the actors don’t exactly rein it in for the camera’s closer scrutiny. Daniel Dae Kim, who plays Hwang’s alter ego, is expected to attend the screening.
CAAMFest 2025 will also feature numerous shorts, a complete five-episode series (international cuisine-themed The Grocery List Show), panel discussions, an Industry Hub for filmmakers (May 8-10 at the Japan Center East Mall), and more. Screening venues are the AMC Kabuki, Roxie Theater and SFMOMA. For full schedule, program, ticket and other info on the May 8-11 festival, go to https://caamfest.com/2025/
