Presenters of the Asian American International Film Festival
Julie Ha and Eugene Yi Transnationalize the Roots of Anti-Asian Hate in ‘Free Chol Soo Lee’ Asian/American films incepted out of the impulse to speak back, and perhaps more critically, they carved a political space to speak from. First-time directors ...
Written By: Kano Umezaki Back in late June of 2021, I had the pleasure of speaking with documentary filmmaker and activist, Renee Tajima-Peña, about the PBS “Asian Americans” series, the origins of the Asian/American political film movement, and the s ...
Written By: Kano Umezaki This article may contain spoilers. At night, around the time the moon’s gaze is at its highest, three people sit around a fire. “Today was supposed to be my funeral,” one man says. Laughter follows, alo ...
Written By: Kano Umezaki This article may contain spoilers. In addition to cultural estrangement, the Korean migrant experience can also be characterized by its forgettings. With a severed homeland leading to forced transnation ...
Written By: Kano Umezaki This article may contain spoilers. For decades, U.S. expansionists have branded Kaua’i as a land for leisure, primed with rich forests and vast shorelines. With its geopolitical alignment to the Asia-Pacific, Kaua’i also p ...
Written By: Kano Umezaki As we celebrate Asian/Pacific/American Heritage Month, I found it important to think about ways in which filmmaking can support the Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) community materially through co ...
Written By: Kano Umezaki This article may contain spoilers Mothers ago, stories were spoken about the Chinese goddess, Chang’e (嫦娥), who swallowed an immortality pill and rose to the moon, leaving her mortal lover behind. Fei Fei, the young Chinese pr ...
Written By: Kano Umezaki In my last article, I wrote about the political necessity of the PBS “Asian American” docuseries in reclaiming our political-cultural beginnings. But in this article, I want to focus on the series’ limitations as invoked th ...
Written By: Kano Umezaki This is the first article to a two-part series reviewing the “Asian Americans” For Asians who are often made invisible in the American colonial imagination, documentary filmmaking becomes a crucial praxis for revisionist s ...