LAAPFF 2015: THE CHINESE MAYOR

A scene from The Chinese Mayor.

A different cultural revolution

By Miranda Inganni

Geng Yanbo, the newly-elected mayor of Datong, China wants to transform the city into a tourist-attracting cultural center. Datong, the most polluted city in China, thanks to its coal mining history, has a massive ancient city wall that Geng envisions containing museums and meeting spaces. The problem is that at least 30 percent of the residents of Datong, many of them poor and their housing illegal, live around that city wall. These residents must be relocated and their dwellings demolished in order for Geng’s reconstruction of the city to take place.

Despite the fact that demolition and construction are very slow and behind schedule, the government wants the residents out. But there is no place for many of them to go. People who cannot afford to move are told that they can apply for low-rent housing, but they know the reality is that there is a long waiting period. Some residents protest by simply not leaving their abodes or by blocking the heavy machinery. A few residents who refuse to move face forcible demolition and threaten suicide.

We follow Geng, in Zhou Hao’s The Chinese Mayor, as he inspects the progress of destruction and construction throughout the city, as he attends meetings in his official capacity, and as he is scolded by his wife who thinks he is working himself to death. He appears tough when he deals with contractors who have put in sub-par paving, taken other shortcuts or are not performing their jobs to his satisfaction. But when the affected residents appeal directly to Geng, he is sympathetic and tries to right the wrongs -- helping folks find housing, ensuring the children of rural residents who gave up their farmland for development have access to the city schools, and even trying to move a woman from her 6^th floor apartment to one on the ground floor as she can no longer walk up the stairs (what the hell happened to the elevator anyway?).

Geng wants to leave the reinvented and revitalized Datong as his legacy. Will he be able to oversee all of the construction through to completion before his mayoral term is up? Is he simply a megalomaniac bankrupting a city for his own status? Director Zhou does a masterful job of not getting in the way of the story. Clearly the residents are the one’s suffering in this scenario, but Geng is not without sympathetic sensibilities. He believes so strongly in “cultural industry” that even if he cannot bring his vision to fruition in Datong, the viewer gets the sense that that will not stop him. He will give this city, or any other, his masterful cultural makeover. Even if it kills him.

The Chinese Mayor screens at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival April 26, 4 p.m., CGV Cinemas. For more information: Mayor.

 

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LAAPFF 2015: OPENING NIGHT WITH EVERYTHING BEFORE US

Ben (Aaron Yoo) and Sara (Brittany Ishibashi) in Everything Before Us.

When love is just a number

By John Esther

The 31st edition of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (LAAPFF) kicked off last night with Everything Before Us.

The first feature film by Wong Fu Productions, co-directed and co-written by Wesley Chan and Philip Wang, along with co-writer Chris Dinh, Everything Before Us is set in a quasi-future California (USA?) where everyone has an Emotional Intelligence score.

In short, Emotional Intelligence scores are based one's ability to maintain a monogamous relationship. These scores not only affect who is available for romance, they can also effect one's ability to get into college, get into a nightclub, receive a loan or land a job.

It is an interesting premise -- which would make for a dystopian future where status, power, reproductive rights and liberties could be based on one's EI score -- but in Everything Before Us the EI score is used in the form of comedy and romance.

Ben (Aaron Yoo) is still suffering from the end of his relationship with Sara (Brittany Ishibashi). Thanks to his role in their breakup, Ben's score is too low to get the job he wants (and deserves). So, after years apart, he reaches out to Sara to help rectify the situation.

Thanks to Sara's cooperation, Ben lands the new job, which also results in a new girlfriend, Anna (Joanna Sotomura). However, there is tension in the air as Ben and Sara still pine for one another.

Meanwhie, Seth (Brandon Soo Hoo) and Haley (Victoria Park) are young Los Angelinos madly in love with one another.  When Haley gets accepted to college in San Francisco, their love is put to the test. Determined to beat the formidable odds of young lovers sticking together "forever," the two agree to register as a couple with the Department of Emotional Intelligence (deliciously portrayed like the DMV) and maintain a long distance relationship.

Despite the rude behavior of some of the film's filmmakers whipping out their phones during the screening to text and go online (dimming the phone light does not cut it), Everything Before Us proved to be a highly enjoyable, smart, very funny, well written story about young people in love. While the narratives of the leads takes a more serious tone, albeit not too serious, there is plenty of comic relief provided by the supporting characters like Anna, along with Ben's friend, Henry (Chris Reidell), Henry's wife, Sandy (Katie Savoy), Haley's dweeby colleague, Taylor (Edward Gelbinovich), and Randall (Randall Park), the DEI representative.

Moreover and more importantly, is here you have an entertaining film where Asian Americans take front and center in the mise-en-scène. Although Asian Americans only make up five percent of the U.S. population they are nearly invisible when it comes to film and television. And, with few exceptions -- John Cho, Lucy Liu, Fresh Off the Boat and the short-lived All American Girl immediately come to mind, when Asian Americans are seen in American film and television, they are often relegated to supporting roles.

This underscores the importance of LAAPFF and good films like Everything Before Us.


LAAPFF runs through April 30 in Downtown LA, Koreatown and West Hollywood. For more information: LAAPFF.



 

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LAAPFF 2012: PAPA MAU THE WAYFINDER

A scene from  Papa Mau: The Wayfinder.

Come sail away with me

By Ed Rampell

Hawaiian director Na’alehu Anthony’s Papa Mau: The Way Finder literally traverses two of the three Pacific Island regions that compose Oceania: Polynesia and Micronesia (the third is Melanesia). Anthony’s camera and archival footage carries us aboard the Hōkūle'a, an ancient-style Polynesian voyaging canoe, from Hawaii to Tahiti and eventually to Satawal atoll in the Caroline Islands, now part of what is called the Federated States of Micronesia.

Rather remarkably, starting in 1976 Hōkūle'a (translated as “the Glad Star”) made these seafaring odysseys of Homeric proportions minus the use of modern technology: compasses, radio transmissions, GPS, engines, even maps per se. Instead, Hōkūle'a relied solely on the age-old techniques: navigating by following the stars, winds, ocean swells, birds and the like, using dead reckoning and more.

Hōkūle'a’s success helped spurr a cultural revival and ethnic pride, a Pacific Renaissance in the world’s last region still dominated by colonialism. Nevertheless, infighting on the canoe during the 30-plus day voyage disturbed Mau, who surreptitiously left the voyagers after they safely arrived at Tahiti and returned to Satawal (mostly, presumably, via jet), leaving the Hawaiians to fend for themselves for the long return trip home with his tape-recorded voice instructions.

The documentary briefly mentions in passing the dissension among the crew, but does not go into detail about the disputes and divisions. This may be because rather than being an objective observer and outsider, director Anthony has been a crewman aboard Hōkūle'a, and may not have wanted to ruffle feathers. Fractiousness among Hawaiians, especially among those in the “movement,” can reach Shakespearean proportions -- but that’s another story.

In any case, over the years Mau was wooed back to Hawaii and, moved by a desire to perpetuate his vanishing seagoing knowledge, rejoined the Hōkūle,a. However, this time, he would not lead as its helmsman, but rather as a teacher training and imparting to Nainoa Thompson of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and company his navigational genius so others could become and continue the master navigator legacy.

I arrived in Tahiti about three months after Hōkūle'a’s first voyage there, and although I’ve never had the luck, honor and privilege to sail aboard this venerable vessel, in the late 1980s I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the canoe’s return voyage from what, until that point, had been its most epic voyage throughout the Polynesian triangle -- taking it all the way to Aotearoa/New Zealand, thousands of miles away from Hawaii.

Now, Hawaiians have been turned by the vicissitudes of a cruel history into an oppressed, landless minority in their own ancestral homeland, and are often what the French call “les miserables,” full of suffering. But I never saw masses of Hawaiians so happy as when Hōkūle'a proudly sailed into Kaneohe Bay at Oahu, and thousands of Hawaiians joyfully participated in the reenactment of ancient customs and traditions. The then-Hawaiian Gov. John Waihee declared: “In my bones, I am screaming, 'I’m proud to be Hawaiian!'” I believe it was at this joyous homecoming where I had the great luck to meet Mau himself, as well as crewman En Hunkin (who became American Samoa’s Congressman), and I subsequently interviewed the then-youthful Nainoa (OMG, he has grey hair now in this documentary!), and became pals with another Hōkūle'a crew member, Donna Wendt (whom I’d share another epic voyage with on the Aranui, from Tahiti to the Marquesas -- but that also is another story).

So this documentary has profound personal meaning for me and this Paliku production (with support from the stellar Honolulu-based Pacific Islanders in Communications, as well as the State government’s Office of Hawaiian Affairs) should be experienced by anyone interested in sailing, Oceania, cultural rebirth, etc., – and in karma. The documentary follows what could be called the further adventures of the Hōkūle'a, its subsequent voyages since I left Hawaii, and reveals the fate of Mau. In what could be called cultural turn about fair play, the Hawaiians whom Mau taught to be master navigators return the favor in a very moving, meaningful way.

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LAAPFF 2012: YES, WE'RE OPEN

A scene from Yes, We're Open.

Closed for good

By Miranda Inganni

Monogamy is overrated. At least according to self-proclaimed “modern” couple Sylvia (Lynn Chen) and her boyfriend, Luke (Parry Shen), in director Richard Wong’s new film Yes, We’re Open.

Mistaking pseudo rebellion for radical social awareness, when not professing their love for each other, Sylvia and Luke contemplate the potential realities of what polygamy would actually mean to them in terms of being modern. (For the record, only hipsters of the silliest sort would be this obsessed with portraying the modern lifestyle.)

Their presumed coolness is put to the test when they meet Elena (Sheetal Sheth) and her partner, Ronald (Kerry McCrohan), at a mutual friends’ dinner party.

This encounter leads to another meeting between the two couples, setting of a sexual experiment preoccupation for Luke and Sylvia as both individuals and as a couple. Do they fuck the couple (maybe a threesome)? Each is granting the other permission to do so, but do they mean it, and what happens if they go through with it?

Considering the film's subject matter, Wong has an opportunity to push some contemporary buttons, but holds way back. For starters, for all the sex that Yes, We’re Open seems to champion, there is barely any flesh. It is not that there has to be nudity, but the film is shot (by Seng Chen) in an extremely modest, practically prudish way. Moreover, Wong and screenwriter HP Mendoza’s narrative is strictly linear and downright bourgeois. There is nothing radical about the film’s storytelling.

Shot in San Francisco, a place sexually permissive by U.S. standards, Yes, We’re Open wants to be a flirty, fun film. And Chen and Shen do admirable jobs personifying a couple contemplating temptation, but the film doesn’t go far enough. In fact, it takes a rather conservative turn by film’s end. The institution of marriage they so bravely mock in the beginning of the film is embraced happily ever after before the final credits roll.

Sylvia and Luke (and the filmmakers) like to talk a good line or two, but they certainly don’t like crossing it.


The Los Angeles Pacific Asian Film Festival screens Yes, We're Open, tonight, 9 p.m., DGA 1; and May 19, 9:30 p.m., Art Theater of Long Beach. For more information: LAAPFF.

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LAAPFF 2012: THE CRUMBLES

Elisa (Teresa Michelle Lee) in The Crumbles.

A piece of rock

By Miranda Inganni

In Akira Boch’s feature film debut, The Crumbles, the preternaturally mature and serious Darla (Katie Hipol) desperately wants her dream to succeed -- having a band that can achieve world dominance. Darla’s dreams seem like they will forever be just dreams until her friend, Elisa (Teresa Michelle Lee) suddenly appears, needing a place to stay. When none of their other friends will help out, Elisa becomes Darla’s indefinite couch-crasher yet an ideal bandmate. While Elisa has the (questionable) talent and drive to “make it big,” she also has an ego to match. The gals hatch their plan, and their fledgling band, and try to make it out of Echo Park, CA.

While Darla is perhaps overly responsible, Elisa is the exact opposite: flighty, a bit manic and fairly selfish. While she is caring and compassionate in rescuing a stray dog, it is up to Darla to pay and care for her (both the pooch and the pal). Elisa wants to party, drink, make music and have sexy times (we assume in order to forget her recent heartache). Darla is all business: work and music.

Darla is real and Hipol seems quite natural and credible in her role. Lee’s Elisa is totally without any redeeming qualities. She’s the kind of woman you think would be fun to hang out with for an hour, only to realize she won’t shut the fuck up and, oh yes, you’re paying the bill. While both young actresses have their qualities, Lee goes for an over-the-top performance where Hipol’s subtlety is more credible.

An all-too-familiar story of trying to make it, without ever really going anywhere, The Crumblesis sweet, local and refreshing -- especially due to the fact that there is no sex or violence.


The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival screening of The Crumbles is tonight, 9:45 p.m., DGA 1. For more information: LAAPFF.

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