More festivals!

Even though our festival just ended, our staff is busy keeping their eyes and ears open for new films for next year. Fortunately for us (and for your cinephile friends in other cities) there's an Asian film festival going on almost every other month of the year across the US that we can either attend or work with to check out films that we might want to show here in DC. Coming up in November:

The Vancouver Asian Film Festival is in their 10th year and will present five days of the best of Asian Canadian and Asian American (heck, let's just say Asian-North American) films. Good luck to Su Anne and the folks in Vancouver!

The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival is also celebrating their 10th anniversary in a few weeks. Thanks to sponsorship from the Canadian Embassy, staff from our festival will be traveling to Toronto to check out what kind of films our friends up north have come up with over the past year. Check back to our blog and gallery for the report in a few weeks.

If you can't make it to Canada, there's some great events coming up in DC over the next few weeks. Starting this weekend, I recommend checking out +/- at the Black Cat on Saturday the 28th. +/- is one of the bands formed out of old members of Versus, a near cult-status band that's been around for over a decade. Versus is one of the first bands that I can remember hearing about and (pleasantly) surprised that most of the members were Asian American.

Also beginning this Friday is the Arabian Sights Film Festival. I haven't read much about the films being shown, but it looks like a great mixture of themes, ranging from present day political documentaries to narrative thrillers.

This Sunday the 29th, the Freer is screening a documentary by Y. David Chung called KORYO SARAM: The Unreliable People. It's a documentary about the forced deportation by Stalin of ethnic Koreans from the remote northeastern provinces of Russia inland to what is now Kazakhstan. David Chung is also an amazing visual artist whose work has been shown often in the DC area, and was also commissioned to complete several public art projects inside metro stops in the DC area.

Next Saturday is the annual SALTAF (South Asian Literary and Theater Arts Festival) at Natural History Museum. Check out PUNCHING AT THE SUN, the debut feature of Tanuj Chopra, who will also be in attendance to discuss the film.

Kicking off next Thursday is the ASEAN Film and Photography Festival at National Geographic. This festival showcases film and photography from the Southeast Asian diaspora. I just noticed it's $5 a screening, which is a bargain, especially for film festivals in this town.

Happy festival hopping!