I hadn’t done a #throwback in such a long time, but seeing how dropping bombs is a recurring theme today, I thought I’d drop a bomb of my own: back in early 2001, filmmaker Justin Lin and Linda Mabalot, our former Executive Director at Visual Communications, struck a modest deal to let VC serve as HQ for the independent feature he was working to get made. 

Erika Vazquez, one of our Communications Associates for the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, has a chat with Operations Manager Alvin Nuval. We are still looking for people to join our Festival team as a volunteer, so sign up here!

Learn about Little Tokyo's rich history and intersection of people of color within Los Angeles in this feature article by Maya Santos and Joel Quizon from Form Follows Function. "Bronzeville, Little Tokyo" is a free program during the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival that will run from April 29-30.

In December 2016, we were pleased to receive news from our friends at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences that the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival has been approved as an Academy Award®-qualifying festival for Short Film Awards. Recipient(s) of the Film Festival’s Golden Reel Award for Narrative Short Film will be eligible for consideration in the Animated Short Film/Live-Action Short Film category of the Academy Awards®. Check out the list of films here.

In the six years since she brought director Leena Pendharkar’s RASPBERRY MAGIC to the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, producer Megha Kadakia has seemingly been a constant fixture at subsequent Festival Week editions. Consider last year, 2015: in addition to serving as Executive Producer for Ravi Kapoor’s MISS INDIA AMERICA (a double-award winner at the Film Festival), she also re-teamed with director Pendharkar for DANDEKAR MAKES A SANDWICH, a droll day-in-the-life short that is being expanded into a full-length feature. Not too shabby for a former UCLA bio-chemistry major whose career shifts into arts management (she served for a time as the Marketing and Communications manager for Artwallah and other multi-cultural arts festivals) have resulted in a rising career as a producer of short and feature-length motion pictures.

To generations of Asian Pacific American cinema artists and arts policymakers, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson has been many things — maverick filmmaker, staunch arts advocate, devoted spouse and closet renaissance woman. While I have not known her as long or as intimately as her contemporaries, she has certainly been impactful to me in the years that I have been involved with organizing this very Film Festival. 

Normally around this time, Festival Senior Programmer Abraham Ferrer would produce an overarching programmer’s overview of the program line-up of The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. This year, we decided to try something a little different: instead of one person’s perspectives, we wondered how the divergent perspectives of our team of programmers would add a little bit of “spice” to our assessment of this season’s programming process. Thus, we issued an invitation to respond to a set of questions that would serve to foreground their thoughts and opinions on what they all observed. Though it took them awhile to respond (our curators were still hammering out their programs as of this writing and did not participate), our core program committee members answered the call. The following is a reflection of what we all thought…

Grace Chikui is a long time resident of Little Tokyo, an ethnic enclave in Downtown Los Angeles. Around the age of 12, Grace lost her eyesight due to glaucoma. I first learned about Grace during a brainstorming session at the Visual Communications office in the basement level of the historic Union Center for the Arts in Little Tokyo. VC was archiving boxes and boxes of old photographs by local resident and avid shutterbug, the late Eddie Oshiro. We eagerly looked through these photographs that depicted daily life in Little Tokyo. Eddie was also the subject of a short film that we also watched that day, Jeff Man’s THAT PARTICULAR TIME. That film also featured lengthy interviews with Grace, a long time friend of Eddie and frequent focal point of Eddie’s camera.