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San Diego Asian Film Festival to Kick off 20th Anniversary with Filmmaker-Studded Red Carpet and Documentary Premiere

Filmmakers and film subjects who shape the way we see San Diego's history will stud the exclusive red carpet kicking off the 20th anniversary celebration of Pacific Arts Movement's . To commemorate this momentous occasion, Pacific Arts Movement will feature the premiere of , the documentary it commissioned to highlight Asian American stories from local neighborhoods in San Diego throughout the decades.

This festival, historically the largest platform of Asian cinema on the west coast, strives to represent the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community through storytelling. Through the decades, the festival has influenced how Asian and Asian American cinema evolved, and The Paradise We Are Looking For displays the AAPI community's long-standing presence in San Diego. The documentary's themes of identity, immigration, inclusion and military presence uncover the relationship between these elements and their lasting impact on AAPI communities.

“Throughout our 20 years, we've discovered thrilling new directors with relationships with San Diego, some of whom grew up here, others who have passed through, but all of whom have something to say about our neighborhoods and communities,” says Brian Hu, San Diego Asian Film Festival's artistic director. “We wanted to challenge them to uncover buried histories and shed light on folks we might think of as ordinary — precisely the everyday laborers, students, family members we pass by every day but who deserve the big-screen treatment because their stories embody the San Diego we are all looking for.”

THE PARADISE WE ARE LOOKING FOR
San Diego has been called many things—including a paradise. It's also a refugee city, a cluster of neighborhoods, a militarized zone, a border town. And Asian American. This collection of four short documentaries, commissioned on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the San Diego Asian Film Festival, maps many such San Diegos— across ethnicity, geography and history.

At the helm are four emerging cinematic voices who have grown up in San Diego, studied there, or once called it home:

Norbert Shieh's stirring film essay recalls a 2008 University City plane crash that cast a somber shadow over a military city.
Quyên Nguyen-Le introduces us to the City Heights mortuary workers who help refugee families grieve.
Joseph Mangat's rousing observational piece thrusts us into the electric immigrant space of a karaoke-restaurant in National City.
R.J. Lozada interviews former classmates at his 20th high school reunion in the South Bay, and finds that memories, including his own, are not always reliable.

Still from “The Paradise We Are Looking for”

ADDITIONAL DETAILS:

Organization:
Pacific Arts Movement

Dates/ times: November 7, 2019
Pre-reception: 5:30 p.m.

The Paradise We Are Looking For screening: 7 p.m.
Post-reception and director Q&A: 9 p.m.
Location: The Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center (7600 Fay Ave, La Jolla, CA 92037)
Tickets: Available at sdaff.org

About the author

Rouven Linnarz

Ever since I watched Takeshi Kitano's "Hana-Bi" for the first time (and many times after that) I have been a cinephile. While much can be said about the technical aspects of film, coming from a small town in Germany, I cherish the notion of art showing its audience something which one does normally avoid, neglect or is unable to see for many different reasons. Often the stories told in films have helped me understand, discover and connect to something new which is a concept I would like to convey in the way I talk and write about films. Thus, I try to include some info on the background of each film as well as a short analysis (without spoilers, of course), an approach which should reflect the context of a work of art no matter what genre, director or cast. In the end, I hope to pass on my joy of watching film and talking about it.

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