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October 9, 2025
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Like that, Asian American cinema is back underground.
After sniffing the mainstream for a few years as the awards-season flavors of the month, Asian American trailblazers Kogonada and Celine Song retreated to white-people films in 2025, and awaited new features by Bing Liu and Justin Lin were buried by unenterprising distributors.
More damning though is the cultural stigmatization of anything “diverse,” with Asian American stories back to being national afterthoughts, and media arts organizations choked from federal funding. Our colleagues at the Center for Asian American Media lost 40% of its annual revenue at the whims of trigger-happy Republicans snuffing out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As we did here at Pac Arts, our festival counterparts at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival lost funding from the National Endowment of the Arts, which has shifted its priorities to projects “that celebrate and honor the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”
A new NEA grant, forced into being by executive order, seeks artistic projects that “honor the national garden of American heroes.” I’m going to guess their heroes don’t include Robert Nakamura, the godfather of Asian American media and the subject of the new documentary THIRD ACT. Or icons like Lucy Liu, Lisa Lu, and Kelly Marie Tran. All are featured in this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival, a garden apparently too unruly, too prickly, too colorful for public support.
And so back underground we go. Not that we ever truly left. Here, we cultivate offbeat narratives with no illusions of “progress” or “representation.” Films like CHARACTERS DISAPPEARING and DEBUT, OR, OBJECTS OF THE FIELD OF DEBRIS AS CURRENTLY CATALOGUED tell histories sideways and without romance. FUCKTOYS and MOUSE are little poison confections. Personal documentaries GAS STATION ATTENDANT and YEAR OF THE CAT depict accidental immigrants rather than model ones, allowing nobody to co-opt their stories for national glory or American dreams. Our garden might be thorny and underkept, but it’s ours and our gates are open.
– Brian Hu
