The 2017 Seattle Asian American Film Festival encompasses more than 50 features and short films over four days in Capitol Hill, including a documentary about Chinese-American restaurants, an ode to Bruce Lee and “Who Killed Donnie Chin?”
The fifth-annual Seattle Asian American Film Festival starts Thursday, with more than 50 features and short films scheduled over four days around Capitol Hill.
The slate of documentaries and fictional films covers a wide range of subject matter — mixed-race blood-cancer patients searching for a bone-marrow donor, a Japanese-American man’s pivotal role in rescuing the shellfish industry, a woman’s romance with her dead best friend — but opening night will be all about Seattle’s Chinatown International District.
“It’s about celebrating our community,” said festival co-director Martin Tran.
IF YOU GO
Seattle Asian American Film Festival
Feb. 23-26, at Northwest Film Forum and SIFF Cinema Egyptian. Festival pass is $75. Individual screening tickets also available; (seattleaaff.org).
Three films will screen together at Thursday’s opening: “A Taste of Home,” which tells the stories of five venerable Chinese-American restaurants; “Year of the Dragon,” an ode to Bruce Lee’s legacy; and “Who Killed Donnie Chin?”
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“Who Killed Donnie Chin?” picks up the story a year after the still-unsolved 2015 murder of the beloved activist and founder of the International District Emergency Center.
“The community wasn’t getting any information on exactly where the murder [case] was at,” said Matt Chan, who directed the short film. “The 24-hour news cycle is such that — especially for broadcast media — if it’s not on the top of everybody’s mind, it’s not worth putting on.”
Chan, whose background is in television news and reality-TV production, made “Who Killed Donnie Chin?” as an example of the possibilities of citizen journalism for a series of workshops.
“What I’ve been doing with these workshops that I’m teaching is empowering people of color and young people,” Chan said. “You can’t expect the news to cover everything that’s important to you. You need to cover what’s important to you and your community, and share it.”
About 15 percent of this year’s films are Seattle productions, and Chan’s film is one that will resonate, Tran said.
“A lot of our audience and a lot of people we work with (knew Donnie), so it’s just an important story to keep alive and keep touching back with, because it affects us so deeply,” he said.
The festival has grown over its five-year life span, said co-director Vanessa Au, with multiple films being shown simultaneously this year on Northwest Film Forum’s two screens. In that period, the festival has filled a void.
“There was a gap in what you could see at a film festival in Seattle before we started SAAFF,” she said. “There were lots of films from Asia at festivals like SIFF, but few events where you could catch an Asian-American film on the big screen here in Seattle.”
That lack of representation is common in multiplexes across the country.
This year, SAAFF will present a 15th-anniversary screening of “Better Luck Tomorrow,” Justin Lin’s tale of high-schoolers behaving badly. The film was a breakout moment for Lin, who has directed four installments of the “Fast and the Furious” franchise and the latest “Star Trek” film since, but it’s an outlier when it comes to predominantly Asian-American casts in major studio movies.
“It’s a seminal film in Asian-American cinema,” Tran said. “There really haven’t been any other major releases from a studio starring Asian Americans since then.”