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.

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.