Singaporean director Anthony Chen is riding quite the wave of success with his feature debut, Ilo Ilo. The film won the Camera d’Or at Cannes 2013 and garnered many more accolades and awards following its smashing premiere. The film follows a strained Singaporean family whose relationship is stretched further when they must adapt to a new Filipino domestic helper named Teresa joining their household. Teresa develops a close bond with Jiale, the young boy she cares for daily.

We spoke to Chen at CAAMFest 2014 about why it took him so long to make his first feature, growing up with a domestic helper, the film’s success, his wife saying he’s difficult to live with, his stubbornness making him a better director, and more.

You won the Camera d’Or at Cannes 2013, which is a big deal for a Singaporean film.
Anthony: It was a big step for Singaporean cinema. Camera d’Or is a prestigious prize, and it’s the first time a Singaporean feature film has won an award at Cannes. I’ve had a very good outing each time I’ve been to Cannes. In 2007, I had a short film in competition, and it became the first Singaporean film to win an award at Cannes. In a way, I think Cannes has been very, very special for me. Cannes probably gave my my career as a filmmaker.

You made ten short films before making this feature.
Anthony: Yes, ten shorts. I’ve made a lot. My first short was made in 2004 when I was 19-20. It was my graduation film from film school. My shorts have done rather well in major festivals. Shorts have been very fundamental in shaping me as a filmmaker and honing my craft as a director. It’s given me a lot of confidence as well from one film to the next. When you get a good critique, that’s when you feel, “Perhaps I do know something about filmmaking.”

So you did shorts for about eight, nine years. Why wait so long to do your first feature?
Anthony: I didn’t feel I was ready at all. In fact, there was an opportunity in 2007 to do a film, after my short won at Cannes. Everyone told me, “Strike when the iron is hot!” That short opened a lot of doors. But I was quite young at the time. I was 23, and I didn’t feel I was ready, so instead, I went back to school in the UK and did a two-year masters in film directing. I wanted to train myself and mature much more before I was ready to take that next big step.

I imagine, with the mindset of, “Am I ready? Not yet,” you must have put a lot of pressure on yourself to make your first feature as good as it could be.
Anthony: I think it was important that mentally and spiritually I felt, “The time is now.”

My parents are from the Philippines, and my mother grew up with a domestic helper. You grew up with one as well, an experience that inspired the film.
Anthony: I think it’s something this part of the world doesn’t really get. A stranger comes into the family, working as a servant, but she very much becomes part of the family. She isn’t like an au pair who comes in during the daytime or during nights when the parents aren’t free; she literally lives with you. In Singapore, because of space constraints, the nanny usually sleeps in the same bedroom as the children. It’s a very intimate, personal connection. What’s fascinating is, the children probably have a much stronger bond with the nanny than the parents. The parents are always busy working.

Your work is very observational, and you seem to have a knack for identifying people’s behavior. Does this skill help you in everyday life to become a better functioning person in society?
Anthony: That’s a great question, but I’m pretty sure the best person to answer it is my wife! She’d probably say, “NO! He’s so difficult to live with!” [laughs] She’s always telling me: “I just don’t get it. You’re always making such delicate, sensitive films about humanity, but you’re so difficult to live with!” I’m very obstinate. I’m very stubborn. I want things my way. I think I see things. I think I’m very sensitive to people and their actions and nuances and emotions. But I’m equally as flawed as the characters in all my films. I think that’s why humanity is worth celebrating. We’re flawed. I don’t believe that just because you understand relationships that you become some kind of saintly person or something. You wish it was like that [laughs], but it’s not the case.

Does your stubbornness make you a better director?
Anthony: I guess so. I’m very obsessive-compulsive when I make my films. I grasp very tightly on what I’m working on, and until I make sense of what it’s about, I don’t let go. It’s very tense. It’s interesting. A lot of critics have told me that I have a very accurate observation of the female psyche. My wife disagrees with that as well! [laughs] “If you understand women so well, why don’t you understand me!” The truth is, because I understand her so well…whatever she wants, I don’t give. [laughs] I can be very manipulative.

You won the award for Best Film at the 50th Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. I understand this is a big deal for a Singaporean film.
Anthony: The Golden Horse has a real legacy. It’s always been known as the Chinese Oscars; it’s beamed to 1 billion Chinese-speaking people all over the world. It’s crowned well known filmmakers like Ang Lee and Hou Hsiao-Hsien. For the longest time, Singapore hasn’t been on its radar. What was a real pivotal change was when our film garnered a record six major nominations and went on to win four. All of a sudden, it made Chinese audiences look at Singapore differently. We’ve been excluded for a long time because we’re an English-speaking country and a multi-racial country.

What is it about your film that’s caused it to break through these barriers?
Anthony: I think it’s the themes in the film that made something that was very culturally specific much more universal. Coming-of-age, family, economic crisis, migration; these are themes people deal with all over the world. I’m beginning to feel this because the film has had such an incredible journey since Cannes. My sense is that, what really connects the film with audiences is that there’s an honesty to the film that feels genuine and not fabricated or manipulative. There were critics telling me that, one reason the film did well at Cannes was that every other film was trying to do something, trying to show off in terms of style, cinematography, subject matter…there’s a lot of gusto. This was the only film that wasn’t trying to do any of that–it doesn’t try to be something it’s not.

You’ve lived in London for a few years now.
Anthony: I actually met my wife in London. I think I can see myself staying in London for a long, long time. It’s a very inspiring city. It makes you feel very small, because there’s so much talent all around you. Just like New York, it’s a city for the arts, with music, theater, cinema, visual arts, museums. What’s amazing is, every time you go out, you feel like there’s so much genius and talent around that whatever you achieve won’t be enough for the city.

You like that feeling.
Anthony: Yes, I do. I feel constantly challenged and put down. You have to struggle and keep going as an artist. It forces you to constantly grow and reinvent yourself. I do like that feeling. It keeps you humble.

What have you learned from Ilo Ilo as a director?
Anthony: It’s allowed me to get a grasp on the international film business. It’s very interesting that a director is talking about the business end of things, but for the first time I saw how things work. I understand how it works when a film ends up selling to different territories around the world. Making shorts for a long time, I was thinking that the short was the short, and then I went to festivals and it was over. It’s almost like I hadn’t come of age as a filmmaker, and then I realized that there is this much bigger community out there, and there’s a certain way films work.

You’ve been on an incredible streak with Ilo Ilo, touching people across the world and winning awards along the way. You were talking about the film being successful at Cannes because it doesn’t beg to be loved; you weren’t grasping at awards as you made the film because you were humble. Will it be a challenge, following the success of this film, to maintain that humility and not strive to capture that kind of notoriety again? How will you stay grounded?
Anthony: I’ve been thinking about that for a long time. My challenge on the next film is to protect my attitude and my values toward filmmaking. I have to find that very raw, undaunted passion for making films. How can I continue to be naive and stay true to myself? Now, I’ve got lots of scripts being thrown at me. The doors have opened, and there are times when I feel like, “Should I do it?” I hope that I can preserve my mentality toward filmmaking, but it really comes from here [points to chest]…from the heart. We’ve seen a lot of auteurs meander around in their careers because all of a sudden there was a lot of money and opportunities. I’m hoping that, with my second and third film, there will be the same sense of me as a filmmaker, the same directorial integrity. I think it’s very important that my films have real heart.

In A Picture of You, a brother and sister (Andrew Pang and Jo Mei) return to their rural childhood home in Pennsylvania to sort through their recently deceased mother’s belongings. They discover shocking photos that change their perception of their mother (Jodi Long) entirely. The siblings process and reckon with the startling discovery in radically different ways, and together they venture down the rocky road toward the truth, clashing the whole way. The film also stars Teyonah Parris and Lucas Dixon.

More refined than your typical domestic drama, A Picture of  You transcends the label of “Asian Film”, portraying its protagonists as siblings, flawed souls, and emotionally textured human beings, a treasure in today’s movie industry, which typecasts Asian Americans rampantly. The film is funny, well-written, relatable, and at times gut-wrenching, and director J.P. Chan exhibits an impressive measure of finesse in his debut feature.

In Part 2 of our interview with Chan, Lucas Dixon weighs in on the film, as with us the two discuss learning that our parents were as confused as us, older folks being freed of life constraints, the film’s visual style, defining the film’s genre, the influence of I Love You Phillip Morris, and more.

Lucas, I asked the rest of the cast this question: Can you remember a time you found a picture of your parents you hadn’t seen before and how it affected you?

Lucas: Of course. Seeing my parents from their young, newlywed days is strange, like they’re complete strangers, but it’s also really sweet. Those are the kind of pictures I’ve seen of my parents.

I have this thing, like a lot of people, where it’s very difficult for me to imagine my parents as anything but responsible adults. They were kids, but I can’t wrap my head around that.

JP: That’s something I’m much more well aware of as I get older. It shatters the idea that you get to a certain point in life and you figure everything out. You just plateau, living your life as an adult. That certainly hasn’t happened for me. That point where I figure it out just always seems further and further down the road. Maybe it’ll never come. By the time my mother was the age I am now, she had been divorced, been through a bankruptcy, been through a foreclosure. She was a single, working class mom with two kids, working as a waitress to stay alive. Then, she found a new home with her new husband and us. She wasn’t even my age, and she’d done all this. She was still trying to figure herself out, also. I think we’re all winging it.

Lucas: My dad is ten years older than my mom, and he was her high school physics teacher. They got married as soon as she turned 18. I’m 28, so imagining myself marrying an 18-year-old at this point in my life is hard.

I don’t want to spoil anything for our readers, but we learn with the main characters that their mom was involved in a relationship that’s pretty progressive as far as American society is concerned. We could have learned any number of things about the mom–what compelled you to write the revelation in this way?

JP: Part of it was that I wanted them to find something about the mother that really turned their world upside-down. The last thing they’d want to learn as they’re grieving for her. There’s also a lot of comic potential involved in that. The other part of it is that I’d heard these kinds of stories from people before, how they would find polaroids of their dad in a book shelf of him with an old girlfriend or something.

Part of me wanted to write another movie about the old folks in the movie, what their life was like before she died. As I get older, I think about how much of the constraints in your life are ones you create for yourself. I was trying to envision a time where, I’m like that old guy in the street who doesn’t give a fuck about being polite in the supermarket line. He’s slightly off, but in some ways he’s uninhibited and free from all these constraints. I was envisioning this world where they had this freedom to live the life that they choose.

The aesthetic of the film doesn’t go for that antiqued, oldie style so many nostalgia indies are painted with. Your film is clean and vibrant, not golden. In the flashbacks of the mom, there’s a dark ring around the image.

JP: The idea behind that came from wanting to portray the flashbacks in a way that was very vivid, like a strong memory, and yet, you don’t know everything that happened around that memory. It’s almost a visual metaphor, how there were things left out from that memory, and the kids find out that there’s a lot they didn’t know about their mom. I think a big inspiration for that visual tool was the old Fiona Apple video for Criminal.

If I were to ask you to put this film in a genre, what would it be?

JP: Ooh…I hate the word “dramedy”. I go back and forth. Is it a drama with funny stuff, or a comedy with dramatic stuff? I think it’s more of a drama with funny stuff.

Lucas: I feel like the draw of the movie, what makes it unique, is its genre, but that genre is hard to define. There are two vastly different chapters in the movie that both feel like their own genres.

JP: I’m cutting the trailer right now, and I’m having a lot of trouble because I have no idea what part of the movie to emphasize.

How about if I put it this way: This film is for lovers of what? What kind of filmgoer would you suggest it to?

JP: It’s a smart, honest movie that doesn’t have a lot of flash to it. It’s a very adult movie, respectful of life and life’s challenges. But also, you have to be playful in life, and life can be funny. There has to be a glimmer of hope that keeps you going. My aspiration for this movie is that, when you’re feeling really terrible, you can kind of curl up with it and feel like you’re not alone.

I freaking love I Love You Phillip Morris. I feel like it’s kind of close to this film. There are so many highs and lows in that movie, with hilarious comedy and serious drama. I love it. It’s full of surprises, and I hope this movie is full of surprises as well.

Lucas: I think the modern day audience likes to know what they’re getting into; I’m going to this movie to cry, I’m going into this movie to laugh. I like art that can give me a very unexpected experience. It might be a very polarizing experience for me, where I’m grieving and then laughing the next moment. That’s the human experience.

In A Picture of You, a brother and sister (Andrew Pang and Jo Mei) return to their rural childhood home in Pennsylvania to sort through their recently deceased mother’s belongings. They discover shocking photos that change their perception of their mother (Jodi Long) entirely. The siblings process and reckon with the startling discovery in radically different ways, and together they venture down the rocky road toward the truth, clashing the whole way. The film also stars Teyonah Parris and Lucas Dixon.

More refined than your typical domestic drama, A Picture of  You transcends the label of “Asian Film”, portraying its protagonists as siblings, flawed souls, and emotionally textured human beings, a treasure in today’s movie industry, which typecasts Asian Americans rampantly. The film is funny, well-written, relatable, and at times gut-wrenching, and director J.P. Chan exhibits an impressive measure of finesse in his debut feature.

We spoke to Chan and his cast after the film’s screening at this year’s CAAMFest, discussing the personal inspirations behind the film, what it’s like to discover old pictures of your parents, CAAMFest, Asian American roles disappearing, a woman thinking the film was shot in Japan (seriously), and more.

For more info, visit apoyfilm.com. Stay tuned for Part 2 of our interview, coming tomorrow.

Let’s start off with the most basic question. What was the inspiration behind the film?

JP: There was a combination of inspirations for the movie. It’s emotionally based on my grieving for my mother when she passed away a few years ago and how it affected my family dynamic, especially with my brother. Also, I realized at that point that I only knew a portion of her. She was so much more than just my mom; she was someone’s wife, someone’s best friend, someone’s co-worker. There was such a fuller picture of her than I realized. Not what happens in my movie, of course, [laughs] but more than I realized.

Can you remember a time when you were rifling through old family stuff and found a picture of your parents that you’d never seen before? How did that feel?

Jodi: I found this picture of my parents sitting on a dock. My mother was spraying the water with her feet. My dad was really into her, and she looked like, “I’m not sure about this.” [laughs] They were in bathing suits in the ’40s.

Jo: My parents immigrated from China, so there’s a big divide in the pictures between when they were young in China and when they immigrated and came to the US. Their younger pictures are black and white. Any time I see pictures of them in black and white, they just look like entirely different people. I think of who they were before me, before moving their lives to the US. They were different people.

How was the screening at CAAMFest last night?

Jo: The challenge of an indie film coming to a small festival is that you’re always worried about how much outreach you can do or how much it’s going to connect with the audience. I was really happy that we filled up the theater and people stayed for the Q&A.

Jodi: I thought it was great. There wasn’t this mass exodus after the screening ended! [laughs] Everyone pretty much stayed. People were laughing and crying.

Did you get the laughs you were looking for, JP?

JP: Oh yeah. This is only our third festival, so not many people have seen the movie, but enough people have seen it for me to feel confident that it works for the audience. I feel like my job now is mainly to get people in the seats and make sure the picture is in focus. The folks at CAAM have been great.

This is a tiny cast, so you had to get the right people to fill those roles, since they’re all important. How did you assemble your actors, and for Jodi and Jo, what was the dynamic like on set?

JP: Jo Mei and I have worked on several shorts before. We knew a bunch of the actors personally. Andrew Pang was someone we knew from the New York Asian American theater scene. He’s done a lot of smaller roles in big movies and TV. I’ve wanted to work with him for a long time, so it was amazing. Jodi came on because people have been saying for years that Jo Mei looks like a young Jodi. She was our first choice for the mother role, so we’re really lucky.

Jo: At first we were worried that she would ignore us! [laughs]

JP: Teyonah was the lead in one of my shorts, before she did Mad Men.

Jo: Teyonah and I went to Julliard together, and Andy and Lucas are Yale grads. I knew of Lucas through my friends at Yale, and he was the perfect type of actor we wanted.

The neighborhood you shot the film in looks gorgeous.

JP: The house is actually owned by a friend of mine and his partner. When they bought the house, they told me that if I ever wanted to shoot a movie there, I could use it. I wrote a script set in his house, and in 2012 showed up at his house with it. We had free access for three weeks.

Jodi: It’s also a really interesting house, architecturally. It’s another character in the movie. The architect designed an upside-down house. It’s really modern. Usually, you walk in and it’s the living room, the kitchen, whatever. In this house, the office is downstairs, then the bedrooms are upstairs, and the kitchen, living room, and dining room are on the top floor, where the best views are. I got to stay in the master bedroom!

JP: Knowing that we had that location nailed down, it allowed us to create the story around it. It really enhanced the story. The clean lines of the house really relate to what the characters are going through, and it’s a nice juxtaposition to the nature outside.

What has your experience been as an Asian American in cinema?

Jodi: JP doesn’t bang the Asian American thing over the head. The characters have this sister-brother relationship, which everybody has. The house is so modern, so indicative of where we’ve come as Asian Americans.

Jo: In the film, we address the fact that we’re Asian, but it’s not the point. We joke about it, because we recognize that we’re in a rural, white town in Pennsylvania in the movie. But we don’t talk about our race over breakfast! We’re human beings. As somebody who’s coming out of school and trying to break into the business, there are circumstances where people are aware that we don’t have to cast Asian actresses as the nail salon worker, or the newscaster, or the waitress, so they give it to somebody else. They’re not expanding those roles, so those little roles are disappearing.

JP: I feel like I would be dishonest if I wrote the film any other way. You could have made the argument, before we hired the cast, that if we hired non-Asian actors, the film would have wider appeal. That may be true. But there’s an inability in the indie film world to process what a film like ours looks like. We don’t think it’s particularly Asian American. I’ve had plenty of white folks come up to us and say, “This isn’t that Asian.” People see Asian faces on a poster and think, “This isn’t for me.” It’s crazy. If I don’t put my work out there the way I want to, then I’m part of the problem. If we white-wash our own movies, we’re fucked!

Jodi: This movie couldn’t exist without all those movies before that focused on being Asian American. It’s an evolutionary process. I mean, I did Flower Drum Song on Broadway, and people still look at that play as the “Asian play.” People were hearing this at the ticket booth. “Do you want to see the Asian play?” This is Rodgers and Hammerstein! Oh my god. Can we ever get beyond this?

JP: In the indie world, I think if people see Asian faces, frankly, they tend to be Asians, and the film is about Asia, or they’re victims of men. I don’t think they know how to process an Asian American, middle-class family drama. At one of our Q&A’s, in Bend, Oregon, a woman that had seen the entire film raised her hand and said, “Was the entire film shot in Japan?” We had a great premiere there, and I wasn’t offended, but to me, that struck me. There’s nothing to indicate that the film takes place anywhere other than America in the present day, but because this woman saw Asian faces, she thought it was in another country.

Jo: In mainstream cinema, they don’t acknowledge the existence of Asian Americans in society. You’re in a hospital, and all the faces are black and white. Even if we were extras, it would at least acknowledge that we exist. When this begins to happen more, women like the one in Oregon wouldn’t think that Asians only exist in Asia.

Jodi: We have to tell our own stories in movies and include faces like ours. Otherwise, we’ll never get into the mainstream. Even if this movie only does an eighth of what X-Men does…

JP: I’d be happy with an eighth! [laughs] I’d be happy with one eight-hundredth!

Jodi: [laughs] You know what I’m saying!

Awesome Asian Bad Guys, which screened a couple of weeks ago at CAAMFest, is an action-comedy that follows The National Film Society, a couple of Asian Los Angeles Youtubers (Patrick Epino and Stephen Dypiangco), as they attempt to track down and assemble the baddest, scariest, most awesome Asian bad guys from the ’80s and ’90s like Al Leong (Die Hard) and Yuji Okumoto (The Karate Kid, Part II) to kick ass and carry out a dangerous rescue mission. An homage to badass Asian actors that highlights them as the stars of the show and not throwaway two-bit villains, Awesome Asian Bad Guys is a fun, silly comedy that should tickle the fancy of anyone who fondly remembers guys like Dante Basco (Rufio, Hook). The film also stars Randall Park, Tamlyn Tomita, and Aaron Takahashi.

Co-director Patrick Epino chatted with us at CAAMFest about the National Film Society, tracking down the bad guys in real life, filming action for the first time, his experience at CAAMFest, and more.

The films at CAAMFest showed the Asian American experience in many ways, but your film views it from a different angle, one that’s more light-hearted and funny.

Patrick: We’ve done our fair share of films…We just wanted to make something kind of fun. The story of the National Film Society is that Steve and I were both in odd places. I’d made a feature that was this dark, brooding comedy. Stephen made a lot of serious short films. Things weren’t super awesome, and we met at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. We both had an interest in building audiences, new media, stuff like that. I had this idea, he had one, we combined them, and we decided to work together and become the National Film Society, which is different from both of our ideas. He wanted to use online video, I wanted to create this Wu-Tang Clan of filmmakers and really leverage audiences and networks and stuff. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s helped us to get to where we are. We started doing goofy online videos, and it translated into Awesome Asian Bad Guys. We still love all kinds of films and still have ideas for different types of projects, but for NFS and Awesome Asian Bad Guys, it’s like, let’s just make this as fun as we can.

You study film and Asian-Am stuff, and you hear about the Long Duck Dongs, the Mickey Rooney character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s…all these marginalized, emasculated Asian characters. What about the bad guys?! Those are the ones I remember! They’re awesome!

So it was as simple as that. They’re awesome!

Patrick: Yeah, it was awesome! I remember Al Leong as a kid. That guy scared me.

So you got this idea for this project about these Asian bad guys. Did you then pursue the actors?

Patrick: When we first made this Youtube video in 2011 called Awesome Asian Bad Guys, we hypothesized about making, like, The Expendables but with Asian bad guys. In maybe May 2012 we thought about making it and we brought Phil Yu, Angry Asian Man, on as an executive producer. We brought on Milton Liu as our writer, a funny, smart-ass-y kind of guy. He introduced us to Diana Williams, a great producer, super talented. With the actors…we’d shot a couple online videos with Aaron Takahashi and Dante Basco. Tamlyn Tomita knew of us. We went to Aaron, Randall (Park), just asking them to be in it. They were totally down, so we got some momentum from  that. We had contacted Al Leong through facebook for our original video, and he was super cool. It was a lot of fun hunting those guys down.

Randall is hilarious.

Patrick: Randall’s amazing. There were a couple times on set where that guy would just go. It was just him–everyone else had left the scene, and he’d so some funny things. He did this web series called “The Food” that’s just the best.

Was the film pretty scripted or was there some ad-lib involved?

Patrick: It was mostly scripted. Everyone threw in things here and there on different takes, but for the most part it’s what was in Milton’s script. We would have loved to play with more improv stuff, but we were always on the fly.

I was actually surprised at how good the action scenes were in the film.

Patrick: We were looking for fight coordinators and we ended up with this guy, Sunny Sun. He’s amazingly talented. He was a stuntman on The Expendables, he’s choreographed stuff for The Avengers. He brought some of his guys on to do the fights, and it was a pleasure working with him. So much fun. I thought I was a 90’s indie film guy. I wanted to make a Jarmusch film or a Kiarostami film or something, you know? I never learned how to choreograph action, but then I learned I don’t have to! There are people to do that for me!

There’s a great child actor in the film. She gets to participate in a lot of the action scenes as well, doing cartwheels and stuff! Where did you find her?

Patrick: We held some auditions for a girl who could do action. She’s a martial artist named Jasmin Currey. Her whole family are, like, black belts in Tae Kwon Do. She’s the sweetest kid, and it was great to work with her. I was like, oh man, this girl could kick my ass! She’s training right now, trying to perfect everything she does as a martial artist and potentially a stuntwoman.

Was the plan all along to string the webisodes together as a film?

Patrick: No, I don’t think so. The script was written, and it was a pretty long script. 60 pages. I guess it was kind of written as a TV show, with act breaks, but when it became and option to screen in festivals, we though we should make it a full piece. The vlog interjections in the film were done after the fact to act as transitions that contextualize what we do for people who don’t know who the hell we are. (laughs)

How has your experience at CAAMFest been?

Patrick: Great. I’m from the Bay, so it’s been a real pleasure. Friends and family came to our screening last night.

Who are some working Asian American filmmakers you particularly enjoy?

Patrick: I really like J.P. Chan’s stuff. I’m a big fan of Ham Tran’s work. I met him in ’04 in Toronto for his short film, The Anniversary. There are a lot of people doing good stuff online. I’m excited to see what the Wong Fu guys do with the money that they raised on Indiegogo. I have no idea what their script is about, so I’m excited for that.

How to Fight in Six Inch Heels

Last Thursday night at San Francisco’s beautiful Castro theater, CAAMFest 2014 kicked with a silly-fun romantic comedy to set the tone for the rest of the 11-day fest. With a ritzy red carpet and droves of sharply-dressed attendees, there was ample excitement in the air for what is one of the most important film festivals in the country for the Asian American community.

CAAM executive director Stephen Gong and festival director Masashi Niwano thanked the packed house of festival-goers and prepped them for what this year’s festival has in store (check out our festival preview for more). They then introduced director Ham Tran to the stage, a long time friend of CAAMFest who’s been showing his films at the festival for over a decade. This year he brought How to Fight in Six Inch Heels, an Asian-American production that was a box office hit in Vietnam, where the majority of the movie is set. With him were his cast and crew, who participated in a Q&A following the film.

Following a short film centered on the evolution of the real-life career of  How to Fight star Kathy Uyen, the feature film got underway. It follows a pretty, neurotic Vietnamese American girl working as an assistant to a domineering French designer in the New York fashion industry. With her fiancé working abroad in Vietnam, she begins to suspect he’s cheating with one of three models working with him when she spies a pair of red heels in his apartment during a Skype call. Determined to smoke out the would be skank, she flies out to Saigon, leaving her best friend George to cover her ass at work. When she arrives, her fashion-god friend Danny glams her up with a makeover and shoves her into the Saigon fashion world where she inadvertently becomes a bit of a runway phenomenon. Now in close proximity to the models in suspect, she’s surprised when she finds herself developing friendships with each of them.

This is light material with cutesy humor running throughout. The film is well crafted and should please general audiences, bouncing between Vietnamese and English dialogue smoothly. Uyen is strong, but it feels like we’ve seen this same quirky, romantically naive character before (The Devil Wears Prada being the obvious example). Every note she hits, while in tune, feels too familiar, which points to the film’s biggest weakness. How to Fight in Six Inch Heels derives too much from American cinema, hitting every rom-com trope and story beat in the book. Many of the characters feel overblown (the gay men especially), but most of the performances hit the mark.

American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs

A documentary that matches its subject’s witty, piercing intellect in its style and form, American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs chronicles the philosophies and staggering accomplishments of Boggs, a Chinese American who dedicated most of her 95 years on this earth to empowering and inspiring the African American community. Director Grace Lee (no relation) uses archival footage, interviews with Boggs and several of her colleagues and friends, and clever vignettes explaining the core principles of two of her major influences, Hegel and Marx, to bring to light not just Boggs’ lifetime milestones, but her tendencies and complexities as a person.

Detroit is the setting, as Boggs calls it home and has played a big part in working to restore the city in the wake of the industrial fallout. Boggs’ most defining characteristic is her hunger to challenge and open the minds of everyone she meets. In the film’s most memorable moment, she sits with Danny Glover in her home and poses that when people talk about “quality education”, what they’re really talking about is black students aspiring to be more like white students. Glover is floored, rendered speechless, and it’s at once hilarious and inspirational. Though Detroit is a shell of its former self, activists like Boggs help to remind us of where its fallen from, why it fell, and where we can take it, if we’re willing to put in the effort and thought. A terrific film.

Cold Eyes

A remake of Yau Nai Hoi’s Eye in the Sky, Cold Eyes, by co-directors Ui-seok Jo and Byung-seo Kim, is a crime thriller set in Seoul that pits a group of undercover surveillance cops against a gaggle of gangsters, with the good guys trying to smoke out the criminals’ mysterious leader. Our hero is Yoon Joo (Han Hyo Ju), a new recruit who has a prodigious photographic memory (if she can clear her head enough to access it) who’s brought in and mentored by veteran Detective Hwang (Sol Kyung Gu). Earning the codename “Piglet”, she joins the team in identifying suspects on the street (while retaining their anonymity, of course). Leading the baddies is the cerebral, deadly James (Jung Woo Sung), who overseas the heists from tall rooftops and viciously dispatches of weak links in the operation without hesitation. The two parties are on a collision course, and as Piglet’s skills help the team close in on James and his crew, he begins to fight back, showing them exactly what he’s capable of.

Jo and Kim have crafted a worthy remake, a tense, riveting look at the classic cops vs. robbers scenario with a focus on advanced technology and modern stratagems. Watching Hwang maneuver his team through the Seoul streets like a chess mastermind is a treat, but it can wear thin. Sometimes the film gets carried away with using video game-like CG street maps that lay out the team’s positions in the city, which serves its function but feels like a bit of a cheat at times. Still, the on-foot, shadowy pursuits are heightened by the public arena, with each of the players moving through the environments swiftly but without looking suspicious. It’s incredibly gripping stuff, and the surprisingly deep character arcs for the mains (the supporting players seem half-baked) makes Cold Eyes’ characters more relatable than those in your average Hollywood heist picture.

CAAMFest, formerly known as the San Francisco International Asian Film Festival, kicks off tomorrow night, Thursday, March 13th, and runs through March 23rd. Presented by the Center for Asian American Media, the festival pays tribute to pioneers of Asian cinema while also providing a platform for emerging Asian filmmakers to showcase their new projects. With Asians and Asian Americans being woefully underrepresented in all forms of media, the festival gives much needed exposure to the Asian cinematic perspective.

Opening Night, Centerpiece, Closing Night, and Special Presentations

The fest kicks off at the Castro Theater with the North American premiere of How to Fight in Six Inch Heels, a Vietnamese box office hit that’s been compared to The Devil Wears Prada. After a post-screening Q&A with director Ham Tran and his cast and crew, the festivities will continue at the Asian Art Museum for the Opening Night Gala.

The festival has not one, but two centerpiece films this year. American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, by director Grace Lee, chronicles the life of Grace Lee Boggs, the 98-year-0ld feminist and social activist. Also being highlighted is a film on the other side of the spectrum entirely: Cold Eyes is a South Korean crime thriller that had great success overseas.

Closing out the festival is Delano Manongs, which will be screening in the East Bay at the New Parkway theater in Oakland, a first for the festival. The doc follows the story of Larry Itliong, a Filipino American labor organizer who spearheaded strikes for farmers on the west coast.

Other festival highlights:

• Spotlight on Grace Lee
• Retrospective on filmmakers and Dharamshala International Film Festival directors Ritu and Tenzing
• A Run Run Shaw tribute
• Out of the Vaults, a showcase of two films from Joseph Sunn Jue’s Grandview Film Company
• Memories to Light 2.0, an exploration of Asian America through home movies

Directions In Sound and Superawesome Launch

The folks at CAAMFest has always been known to throw the biggest, coolest festival parties and events around, and they aren’t slouching this year. Directions in Sound is a live music program showcasing music acts from Korea, Vietnam, and the Bay Area, and this year CAAM is presenting two live concerts: “Here Comes Treble”, an all-female show, and “Korean Showcase”, consisting of all Korean bands.

My most anticipated event is the “Superawesome Launch Featuring Awesome Asian Bad Guys”, which will be held at the Oakland Museum of California. Featuring live music, an Asian-focused Off the Grid, the event also includes a screening of Awesome Asian Bad Guys, an action-comedy by Patrick Epino and Stephen Dypiangco that stars old Asian actors who you’ve seen play evil dudes in movies for years.

For more info, visit caamfest.com