Special Presentations

7 DAYS

Ravi and Rita dutifully go on an arranged blind date. He’s awkward and sincere, while she’s respectfully present, all to get through the ritual of appeasing their traditional Indian parents. And then COVID strikes! Their phones buzz with news about a stay-at-home order, public transportation is suspended, and they’re stuck…

Special Presentations

CATCH THE FAIR ONE

Boxer Kaylee’s been training for the fight of her life, every punch growing more agile and ferocious than the last. This time, the fight won’t be in the ring. Kaylee’s got word that her sister, missing for two years, was abducted by human traffickers. With every reason to fear for…

Special Presentations

DRIVE MY CAR

Yusuke lives life the way he directs his plays: with precision and purpose. Perhaps it’s a reaction to death in his family. Perhaps it’s his way of maintaining control. So when the producers of his latest show require that a stranger be his chauffeur during rehearsals, he only cautiously relents.…

Special Presentations

INSIDE THE RED BRICK WALL

In 2019, demonstrators occupied Hong Kong Polytechnic University to protest a pro-Beijing extradition bill. In the crowd, rubbing shoulders with protestors, was a collective of documentarians filming this historical crossroads as police marched in and blocked the exits. A captivating on-the-ground documentary, filmed with journalistic instincts and a sympathy for…

Asian American Panorama

200 CIGARETTES FROM NOW

Bottles of Bombay Sapphire, an aquarium, and countless LED lights—the neon decor of an overstimulated boredom—adorn this electric and emotional debut by young filmmaker Tianyu Ma. The film follows Xia, shuffling through lovers and experiences like she’s doomscrolling on her phone.

Asian American Panorama

A.RTIFICIAL I.MMORTALITY

This rental is no longer available

What makes us human? Can it be replicated? If you could preserve your consciousness forever, would you? Award-winning filmmaker Ann Shin invites us to explore these questions in this documentary about artificial intelligence and familial loss.

Asian American Panorama

ACCEPTED

T.M. Landry College Preparatory is a legendary Louisiana K-12 school with astonishing rates of college acceptances. As documentarians explore the secret sauce behind the school’s success, they are confronted with a startling truth that threatens the school’s unique premise of meritocracy and the promise of upward mobility for students of…

Asian American Panorama

AMERICANISH

Sam, Mayram, and Ameera—three very different Muslim women from the same family—try to find their own path to love and happiness in America. A quintessentially Jackson Heights rom-com that celebrates how challenging tradition can strengthen the ties that remain.

Asian American Panorama

CLYTAEMNESTRA

A South Korean theater troupe gathers in a Greek Airbnb to rehearse scenes from an adaptation of Agamemnon. The drone of rehearsals, movement exercises, guided critiques, and tours of ancient ruins provides a hypnotic backdrop to Ougie Pak’s art-meets-life tale of a director as king, and the perverse exercises an…

Asian American Panorama

I WAS A SIMPLE MAN

Facing death, a solitary patriarch comes to terms with the forces that have shaped his life and the island he calls home. Time and memory swirl like clouds over Hawai’i’s changing landscape in this intimate sophomore effort from Christopher Makoto Yogi (August at Akiko’s). Starring Steve Iwamoto and Constance Wu.

Asian American Panorama

INDIA SWEETS AND SPICES

Coming home from UCLA, Alia meets a handsome grocery worker—the very opposite of her crazy rich family’s marital expectations for her. But a surprise run-in at a lavish mansion party has Alia suspicious about her mom’s history, and what kind of ideals she’s long buried beneath the bling.

Asian American Panorama

ISLANDS

Following the death of his mother, a single, middle-aged Filipino immigrant desperately searches for love while struggling to care for his rapidly ailing father. Director Martin Edralin’s feature debut is an achingly tender and compassionate depiction of loneliness and the brutality of immigrant realities.

Asian American Panorama

LIKE A ROLLING STONE: THE LIFE & TIMES OF BEN FONG-TORRES

Suzanne Joe Kai’s documentary sheds light on the most illustrious byline in 1970s rock and roll journalism, covering the greatest hits—interviews with Elton John, Marvin Gaye, and others—and the basement tapes: the backstory of a Chinatown kid who helped build music’s most influential magazine.

Asian American Panorama

LUMPIA WITH A VENGEANCE

Fogtown’s finest return to save a fab Fil-Am wedding from a queenpin slinging drugs disguised in lumpia. If every comic book movie needs a sequel, this one ups the special effects, star cameos, and of course vengeance, while never betraying the heart, humor, and community that made the original a…

Asian American Panorama

MANZANAR, DIVERTED: WHEN WATER BECOMES DUST

Once a source of water, groundwater “mining” has made Owens Valley the nation's largest source of toxic dust. A riveting look at how Los Angeles’ sprawl is tied to the Manzanar internment camp, indigenous resistance, and federal versus city power clashes—and how fighting to save history might save us all.

Asian American Panorama

SEE YOU THEN

Thirteen years after a sudden breakup, two exes reconnect: Naomi (SDAFF favorite Lynn Chen), an artist who questions her marriage and motherhood, and Kris, a techie who has since transitioned. What follows breaking the silence is a night of revelations and reckonings. Award-winning director Mari Walker’s deeply personal feature film…

Asian American Panorama

SILENT RIVER

Grappling with an estranged wife and a mystery limp, Elliot checks into a highway hotel where thumps coming from next door lead him into the otherworld of a neighbor with mysteries of her own. Chris Chan Lee’s long-awaited big-screen return is an unnerving desert hallucination with Lynchian cowboys and stifling…

Asian American Panorama

WHO IS LUN*NA MENOH?

A documentary about LA-based, Japanese performance artist Lun*na Menoh. Or is it? With Lun*na, who once made a coat out of a sofa, nothing is ever as it seems. And under the “direction” of Jeff Mizushima, who once made a road trip film about a hamster, the results are sure…

Asia Pop!

AND SO THE BATON IS PASSED

Chronically unlucky kid Mitan learns to smile when her single dad brings home a vivacious new girlfriend. Meanwhile, chronically modest teen Yuko goads her pushover dad to remarry. These parallel stories of single parents who double their love escalate into a fanciful family melodrama unafraid to enchant.

Asia Pop!

AS WE LIKE IT

Shakespeare’s comedy of coupling is transplanted into a candy-colored Taiwan of the future, with an all-femme cast. In their playful hands, Shakespeare is just one ingredient in this exuberant pop cultural hotpot, where huangmei opera bumps into video game aesthetics, and classic songs are reimagined for a future queer utopia.

Asia Pop!

BEYOND THE INFINITE TWO MINUTES

Cafe owner Kato discovers a delay between his computers that enables him to speak with himself, two minutes into the future. Will Kato and his friends prevent paradoxes in time, or profit off their prophetic point of view? Director Junta Yamaguchi and the Europe Kikaku theater troupe team up in…

Asia Pop!

HIT THE ROAD

Panah Panahi’s unusual family road trip film. Dad’s leg is in a cast while his kid’s mouth is racing a mile a minute. The destination remains a mystery, but the occasional stop and the immensity of the unsaid point as much to the political context as the patience and fortitude…

Asia Pop!

IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE

In an attempt to find a way to escape the dullness of unemployment and the dread of a masked society, Miki and Kenji stumble upon faint sparks of love as they venture into English-speaking cafes to invent pandemic identities. Maya Tstsumi’s charming rom-com offers sweet relief from social isolation through…

Asia Pop!

JAMES & ISEY

As endearing a birthday present as cinema has ever seen, this joyous documentary follows Maori elder Isey during the days leading up to her 100th birthday, an occasion her son James strives to ensure will be full of culture, history, comrades, and swigs of whiskey.

Asia Pop!

LISTEN BEFORE YOU SING

With young people migrating out of their deep mountain hometown, an elementary school faces being shut down, unless it can prove its worth at a national choir competition. Led by a determined volleyball coach who can’t even read music, the kids confront their insecurities as they learn to showcase their…

Asia Pop!

OFFICE ROYALE

Beneath the polite, polished veneer of the Tokyo corporate churn is the bruising, no-holds-barred secret life of office ladies who punch and punish their way to the top of a manga-esque fight club. In the year’s rowdiest and funniest Japanese film, the demure, 23-year-old Naoko has no intramural alliances, but…

Asia Pop!

SINKHOLE

Apartment residents exchange daily pleasantries and become fixtures in each other’s middle-class lives, when SINKHOLE!! Their entire building is unfathomably devoured by the earth, and a merry band of survivors must tackle a challenge that’s definitely not in the HOA manual. This disaster comedy took Korea’s pandemic box office by…

Asia Pop!

TIME

Luminaries of Hong Kong cinema’s golden age star as washed-up former action heroes who now pay the bills as knife-slinging, real-life hitmen, when the wrong kind of assignment has them wondering if it’s time to call it quits. A stylish mix of comedy, action, and drama, TIME is a fitting…

Asia Pop!

TIONG BAHRU SOCIAL CLUB

Sweet Ah Bee is the newest Happiness Agent at a resort deadly serious about cracking the happiness algorithm. Assigned to a surly cat lady, an AI bff, and a squad of lemon-clad coworkers, Ah Bee diligently tries to up his numbers in this gently quirky look at science, pleasure, and…

Masters

BARBARIAN INVASION

A dramatic actress trains in martial arts for her next role, only to find fact and fiction, film and film-within-film wrapping into one another. Tan Chui Mui directs and stars in this award-winning Möbius strip of a narrative, entangling action film and family drama in masterful ways.

Masters

COME HERE

A group of young artists explore a grisly monument to their nation’s past in Anocha Suwichakornpong’s (Mundane History, By the Time it Gets Dark) latest elliptical meditation on Thai identity.

Masters

IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE

A former actress returns to Korea after years in the United States, only to find a world familiar but not quite hospitable. Beckoning her home is a hotshot director who invites her to lunch. Starring veteran actress Lee Hye-Young in her first film role in over a decade.

Masters

INTRODUCTION

Praying for a second chance at love, life, and redemption is a central motif in this sublime film, which charts the emotional travails of estranged parents and their emotionally confused children. Three continent-hopping, booze-filled vignettes end in the only logical place for master director Hong Sang-soo: the beach.

Masters

MEMORIA

Apichatpong Weerasethakul reaffirms his place among the great living filmmakers with this sonic time-space odyssey set in Colombia’s jungle. Starring Tilda Swinton in a performance as moving and mysterious as the atmosphere it serves, MEMORIA follows a woman’s intuitive obsession with sound to the deepest realms of human contemplation.

Masters

ONE SECOND

Hours before showtime, a movie reel is stolen, and the culprits become embroiled in the town’s grand plan to salvage the screening. The legendary Zhang Yimou (To Live, Hero) stages another searing Cultural Revolution drama, a glimmering tribute to the big screen experience and the small, beaming faces that give…

Masters

WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY

Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi set out to make three short films about coincidence and imagination. The results are another set of tender mysteries: a woman knows a secret about her best friend’s new crush, a student tries to entrap a professor, and classmates reunite in the street after twenty years.

Unknown Pleasures

ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS

Filmmaker Qiong Wang excavates the dramatic impact of China’s one-child policy on her and her siblings’ upbringings. Approaching her subjects with the kind of unrelenting inquisitiveness that only an intimate could manage, she crafts an expertly paced series of revelations that underlines the deeply personal nature of what we call…

Unknown Pleasures

DAYS BEFORE THE MILLENNIUM

Like many Southeast Asian women in the 1990s, Van Tue moves to Taiwan and marries a Taiwanese man, who offers status but never the comforts of home. As the years pass, another Vietnamese woman appears, claiming a very different kind of stature and acceptance in an adopted home. A bona-fide…

Unknown Pleasures

KIM MIN-YOUNG OF THE REPORT CARD

Back in high school, Jung-hee and Min-young imagined their future lives as young Korean women through their poetry club and BFF slumber parties. College ultimately sets them on different paths though, and club meetings become lifeless conference calls. One day, Jung-hee packs up her suitcase to visit Min-young, in hopes…

Unknown Pleasures

THE MOON REPRESENTS MY HEART

Filmmaker Juan Martín Hsu travels from Argentina to Taiwan to visit his mother, intending to investigate the circumstances of his father’s murder. Family trips to shrines and karaoke bars, evenings over beer and cigarettes, and loosely connected melodramas unravel a story of grit, diasporic love, and dislocation.

Unknown Pleasures

A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING

India’s violent legacies of casteism and religious discrimination haunt the grainy black-and-white images in Payal Kapadia’s trance-like feature debut, winner of the top documentary prize at Cannes. Footage shot on college campuses is tied together with the invented tale of an inter-caste romance, communicated via a series of “found” love…

Unknown Pleasures

A RIVER RUNS, TURNS, ERASES, REPLACES

Shengze Zhu’s melancholic meditation on industrialization and homesickness, set at the banks of the Yangtze River in her hometown of Wuhan, was begun in 2016 when Zhu was living abroad. The film opens with footage of empty streets in February 2020, to be haunted by the pandemic thereafter.

Unknown Pleasures

WHETHER THE WEATHER IS FINE

After Typhoon Haiyan hits, a son, his mother, and his friend navigate an uncanny city in ruins, targeting a rumored ship that will take them to safety in Manila. Abundant with visual wonders, Carlo Francisco Manatad’s award-winning debut is energized by a vibrant new approach to filming an unrecognizable world.

Unknown Pleasures

WRITING WITH FIRE

India’s only all-female newspaper, Khabar Lahariya, is founded and run by Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) women. Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s documentary follows Khabar Lahariya’s reporters as they fearlessly investigate unsolved rapes and murders, illegal mining, Hindu nationalism, and other topics with nuance and ruggedness.

Classics Restored

DIM SUM: A LITTLE BIT OF HEART

Before he directed The Joy Luck Club, Wayne Wang made this underseen family comedy about Chinese American mothers and daughters. As her mother approaches the age a fortune teller once predicted she would pass, Geraldine feels pressure to get married. Wang pays tribute to the sweetness of everyday kinship and…

Classics Restored

EXECUTION IN AUTUMN

One of late director Lee Hsing’s most acclaimed works, EXECUTION IN AUTUMN is a chamber drama of riveting moral stakes. Having gotten away with everything his entire life, a rich man awaits exoneration after being sent to death row for murder—until an unexpected bargain emerges that puts his family to…

Classics Restored

KUMMATTY

Govindan Aravindan’s playful cinematic parable about a geriatric “boogeyman” who heralds springtime and turns children into animals.

Classics Restored

LUMPIA

The first Asian American superhero movie! Back in 1996, Patricio Ginelsa started filming this ultra low-budget, comic book-inspired tale of Bay Area Fil-Am teenagers who battle some F.O.B.-bashing bullies with the help of a mysterious, lumpia-lashing hero. Completed seven years later, and now fully remastered, this cult comedy proves that,…

Classics Restored

TERMINAL USA

In Jon Moritsugu’s post-punk twist on the family sitcom, Dad calls drug-dealing son Katzumi a “mutated stain on the young silk of the clan,” which might also be a way to describe this film’s proverbial middle finger to the model minority myth. Sex tapes, subculture studs, and alien encounters warp…

Short Films

SHORTS: ❤️ Beats

A cinematic ode to all that moves us—the rhythms, rituals, dances, and songs that heal, supercharge, and subvert the system.

Short Films

SHORTS: ANIMATED ECHOPLEX

Kimchi-steeped celluloid, digital tours of ancestral homes, and love poems cobbled by DVD menus are just some of the methods on offer in this time-testing slate of shorts, where animation in expanded form draws the what-if recesses of our pasts and futures.

Short Films

SHORTS: GHOST WORLDS

The ordinary is uncanny in these stories of unresolvable desire and that which hangs heavy on our days. Featuring haunted home videos, foreign language fonts, and a late night busful of fated strangers.

Short Films

SHORTS: HONG KONG, HONG KONG

What do nostalgia for and dreams of a future look like in Hong Kong, a place that has always been in a state of impermanence, taking on chameleon-like identities? The makers of these shorts examine the urgent and emergent in a city in flux.

Short Films

SHORTS: LEARNING DISTANCE

From walkie-talkies with limited range and maximum love, to a visa for a trans/national body, shorts that confront the estrangements induced by the objects and technologies that connect us across space and time.

Short Films

SHORTS: REEL VOICES

Reel Voices empowers high school students to become socially-conscious storytellers—tackling topics like fandom, beauty standards, belonging, and diversity, in stories that are both personal and deeply relevant to the broader San Diego community.

Short Films

SHORTS: SCHOOL DAYS

Prom night revelations, awkward locker room encounters, and unintended detours on Multicultural Day: shorts with characters that read between the lines and color outside the box, while growing up between worlds.

Short Films

SHORTS: SHAMELESSLY QUEER

From LA to South Korea, these 7 shorts celebrate emotionally fraught and fearless journeys—and unlikely encounters—when living authentically ain’t easy.

Short Films

SHORTS: SPACE WAS THE PLACE

Histories reside in plain sight in these spatial stories of punk in Little Tokyo, Platoon under the BevMo! awning, soap opera anthems amidst social unrest, and all that is buried, lost, and endures in the architectures around us.

Short Films

SHORTS: TRACING CONTACT

Long shorts that simmer low and slow—whether between family, friends, or places long departed, they sketch the inheritances, distortions, and reverberations that draw loved ones together and drift them apart.

Short Films

SHORTS: ULTRACOOL

Who says looks aren’t everything?! Delivering eerie monochrome surrealisms, live-action anime aesthetics, and Nickelodeon-esque neons, these high-style short films work from the outside in, at once seducing audiences and subverting expectations.

Classics Restored

LUMPIA

The first Asian American superhero movie! Back in 1996, Patricio Ginelsa started filming this ultra low-budget, comic book-inspired tale of Bay Area Fil-Am teenagers who battle some F.O.B.-bashing bullies with the help of a mysterious, lumpia-lashing hero. Completed seven years later, and now fully remastered, this cult comedy proves that,…

Asian American Panorama

LUMPIA WITH A VENGEANCE

Fogtown’s finest return to save a fab Fil-Am wedding from a queenpin slinging drugs disguised in lumpia. If every comic book movie needs a sequel, this one ups the special effects, star cameos, and of course vengeance, while never betraying the heart, humor, and community that made the original a…

Asia Pop!

AS WE LIKE IT

Shakespeare’s comedy of coupling is transplanted into a candy-colored Taiwan of the future, with an all-femme cast. In their playful hands, Shakespeare is just one ingredient in this exuberant pop cultural hotpot, where huangmei opera bumps into video game aesthetics, and classic songs are reimagined for a future queer utopia.

Unknown Pleasures

DAYS BEFORE THE MILLENNIUM

Like many Southeast Asian women in the 1990s, Van Tue moves to Taiwan and marries a Taiwanese man, who offers status but never the comforts of home. As the years pass, another Vietnamese woman appears, claiming a very different kind of stature and acceptance in an adopted home. A bona-fide…

Classics Restored

EXECUTION IN AUTUMN

One of late director Lee Hsing’s most acclaimed works, EXECUTION IN AUTUMN is a chamber drama of riveting moral stakes. Having gotten away with everything his entire life, a rich man awaits exoneration after being sent to death row for murder—until an unexpected bargain emerges that puts his family to…

Asia Pop!

LISTEN BEFORE YOU SING

With young people migrating out of their deep mountain hometown, an elementary school faces being shut down, unless it can prove its worth at a national choir competition. Led by a determined volleyball coach who can’t even read music, the kids confront their insecurities as they learn to showcase their…

Unknown Pleasures

THE MOON REPRESENTS MY HEART

Filmmaker Juan Martín Hsu travels from Argentina to Taiwan to visit his mother, intending to investigate the circumstances of his father’s murder. Family trips to shrines and karaoke bars, evenings over beer and cigarettes, and loosely connected melodramas unravel a story of grit, diasporic love, and dislocation.