Asian Fortune Your source for all things Asian American
By Vania Cao
The 2014 APA Film Festival will be short and sweet. Breaking from its usual tradition of a seven or ten day festival, this year’s festival will be a three-day affair. Asian Pacific American Film (APA Film) is a nonprofit, all-volunteer run organization established in 2000, with the mission of directing attention to the creative energy of the Asian Pacific American (APA) communities in the D.C. metro area. Every year, APA Film strives to put on a film festival featuring original shorts, movies and documentaries created by local filmmakers, with the Rising Star Youth Filmmaker, George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker, and Best Short Film prizes awarded during the event. This year’s festival will take place on October 2nd –4th.
Christian Oh, the new Executive Director of APA Film, is a familiar face for those in the Washington D.C. Asian and Pacific American arts and entertainment scene. He was involved in the APA Film Festival in 2005, and served as its President from 2007 to 2009. He left APA Film to found the Washington DC branch of Kollaboration, a national talent show platform for local Asian American artists to perform and compete against other entrants across the country, and saw Kollaboration D.C. through talent showcases from 2010 to 2013.
After stepping down as Executive Director of Kollaboration DC earlier this year, Oh was invited back to APA Film, and has taken up the job of influencing the future path of the organization, along with organizing the October film festival.
With the festival’s film submission deadline past, APA Film staff are currently in the process of viewing, scoring and ranking the submitted films. Originality, creativity, cinematography, performance, production value, pacing, structure, sound and music are all elements being ranked alongside the piece’s impact or skill in representing Asian Pacific American diaspora and relevant themes. The movies which will be shown at this year’s film festival will be announced on September 2nd.
Oh stressed that great storytelling is desired above all else in the movies they select. “We want to be able to showcase films you’ll likely never be able to see anywhere else,” he said. “We want to make sure what we see is not just high quality, but that there’s a uniqueness about them.”
APA Film has also begun to expand its horizons past movies alone. Oh has big plans for making a greater impact in the DC metro arts scene.
“Because of my interests not only in film, but also in entertainment and other creative outlets, I decided that we shouldn’t just do a film festival,” Oh said. Having taken the helm at APA Film as the organization was undergoing some changes, he has been working to streamline and restrategize their objectives. “Our motto after this rebirth of APA Film is, ‘Raising APA media to new heights.’ That includes music, film and everything that can be categorized under the creative umbrella.”
In line with this goal, Oh is spearheading more direct and active community involvement to raise the organization’s visibility. From hosting a DC comedy show featuring Jenny Yang from Showtime (Disoriented Comedy), to supporting the D.C. Shorts Film Festival, to holding a joint happy hour with the DC Taiwanese American Professionals group on Demystifying the CIA, DC APA Film is making itself known to a variety of organizations with both ethnic and non-ethnic audiences.
“We have such diversity in the DC area,” Oh said. “We have to make sure we’re catering to it, so it’s not just preaching to the choir, but also to non-Asian Americans. As much as [others] might classify or categorize us by the color of our skin, we have differences and nuances. Chinese is different from Korean is different from Vietnamese is different from South Asian; this is important for the rest of the community to understand.”
Beyond helping budding filmmakers and Asian diaspora with their creative aspirations, Oh stresses an importance in bridging eastern and western cultures. “We have to understand where we come from,” he said. As such, DC APA Film is working with and supporting Asian media organizations and events, such as the D.C. Chinese Film Festival (Sept 4th-7th).
Aside from showing the movies selected for awards, APA Film has also begun to host dedicated feature screenings as part of its outreach agenda this year. The staff are specifically looking for movies that offer unique ethnic perspectives to DC area film buffs. “Earlier, we screened a powerful film called ‘Cambodian Son’,” Oh said. “Next up on Sept 27th, we’ll have a dedicated screening of ‘Awesome Asian Bad Guys’.”
Awesome Asian Bad Guys, a tongue in cheek webseries which pokes fun at the bad stereotypes of the Asian bad guy, is a tribute to the Asian villains who are ‘often seen, rarely heard, but always kickass.’
“It’s going to be a lot of fun,” Oh said. “It’s going to be a very funny web series and we’ll be showing 2-3 episodes at our screening”.
For more information about APA Film, the APA Film Festival, or the upcoming screening of Awesome Asian Bad Guys, visit http://www.apafilm.org/ or http://www.facebook.com/apafilm
