Lia Chang and Garth Kravits in HIDE AND SEEK.

Lia Chang and Garth Kravits’ Hide and Seek is an official selection of the 2016 Sacramento Asian Pacific Film Festival, and will screen on Saturday, May 28, 2016 in the Drama/Foreign lineup of films from 12:45 PM 4:55 PM.

Lia Chang and Garth Kravits at the 2016 Katra Film Series in New York on May 14, 2016.

Lia Chang (Big Trouble In Little China, New Jack City, King of New York) stars in Hide and Seek, a film she co-produced and co-wrote with Garth Kravits (The Drowsy Chaperone, “The Blacklist,” “Nurse Jackie,” “Hostages” ), who is also featured in the film. Hide and Seek addresses the topic of media images that validate beauty in contemporary America. Hide and Seek was named among the top ten films of the 2015 Asian American Film Lab‘s 72 Hour Shootout -Two Faces – Filmmaking Competition, and Chang received a Best Actress nomination for her starring role. Kravits shared camera operator duties with Evan Daves, composed the original score with Tyler Kent, directed and edited the film.

Examiner.com: Q&A with ‘Hide and Seek’ filmmakers Lia Chang and Garth Kravits

Someone Else (72 min)
Break
Hide and Seek (4 min)
Frank and Kass (7 min)
The Sweetening (20 min)
Special Presentation: Persona Non Grata (139 min)

The 2016 Sacramento Asian Pacific Film Festival runs May 27 – 28, 2016 at The Guild Theater, 2828 35th St, Sacramento, CA 95817, and will screen 30 films. Ticket purchasers may buy either a Full Festival Pass for access both days; all day Friday (3PM – 10:30PM); all day Saturday (11AM – 10:30AM); Half-Day Saturday day (11AM-4:30PM), or Half-Day Saturday evening (5PM -10:30PM). Click here purchase a full festival pass or tickets.

FULL FESTIVAL PASS
Access all Screenings, both Festival days!
Fri 5/27 3PM – 10:30PM
Sat 5/28 11AM – 10:30PM

Full Festival Pass, Advance Price (ends 5/20)
General FFP: $40 ($50 after 5/20)
Students/Seniors FFP: $21 ($25 after 5/20)
Students may be requested to provide a valid student ID. Seniors are 62 year young and up.

Check out the full lineup below.

FRIDAY: Comedy | Documentary | Open Submissions

3:00 – 5:50 PM

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Frequency

USA / 2016 / Narrative, Sci-Fi / 12 min

Directed by Geoffrey Haack
Geoffrey Haack is a S.F.-based freelance photographer and art director. He began at Publicis & Hal Riney in 2011 as Art Director and left in 2014.

Synopsis: A lone traveller enters an uncharted world in search for life.

Up in the Clouds

USA / 2015 / Animation / 2 min

Directed by Ed Moy
Ed Moy is an actor, filmmaker and journalist. He is also the co-writer of the award-winning short film Keye Luke about the life of pioneering Asian American actor Keye Luke, who portrayed Master Po on the “Kung Fu” television series in the 1970s, as well as playing the role of Number One Son in the 1930s-40s Charlie Chan films and appearing as the first Kato in the Green Hornet film serials of the 1940s. His documentary about pioneering Chinese Aviatrix Katherine Sui Fun Cheung, is also screening at the festival.

Synopsis: A teenager falls in love with flying while learning to drive a car with her dad.

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LA Dreamers

USA / 2016 / Documentary / 5 min

Directed by Dani Fortuny
Dani Fortuny studied at prestigious Spanish film school of ESCAC. Born in Barcelona, Dani has been involved in documentaries, music videos and commercials. With strong cinematographic style his projects has been all around the world.

Synopsis: Five Japanese girls meet in Los Angeles. They are far from home but they have same goal, chase the dream of becoming hip hop dancers.

The Detached

USA / 2014 / Experimental / 13 min

Directed by Tatsu Aoki
Tatsu Aoki (director and filmmaker) is a prolific artist, a filmmaker, composer, musician, educator, and a consummate bassist and shamisen lute player. Based in Chicago, Aoki works in a wide range of musical genres, ranging from traditional Japanese music, jazz, experimental, and creative music and producing experimental films. He is now adjunct associate professor in the Film, Video, and New Media Department, teaching film production and history. He has produced more than 30 experimental films and is one of the most in-demand performers of bass, shamisen, and taiko, appearing in over 90 recording projects. http://tatsuaoki.com/

Synopsis: Director / filmmaker Tatsu Aoki’s collaboration with producer / choreographer Lenora Lee was filmed on Angel Island. It features Lenora Lee Dance performing in the East Garrison hospital, which was used as a US military processing station from 1900 to 1941.

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Avenue X

USA / 2014 / Drama / 21 min

Directed by Benjamin To
Benjamin To is a Southern California based writer, director, and producer who founded The BAND WITH NO NAME Film Company. His work has been featured in numerous publications, such as The Huffington Post, NBC News, and the Los Angeles Times, for creating artistic discussions about race relations, diversity in media, and gender equality. Benjamin recently received his Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the California State University, Fullerton. He continues to create content that raises awareness and sparks dialogue about the Asian American experience, as well as other communities of color, to provide a platform for their voices to be heard.

Synopsis: Avenue X, a gritty film noir which features a cast entirely of color, follows a battle-worn detective in search of a missing child from his past during the harsh times of 1940s Los Angeles.

Small Potatoes

USA / 2016 / Drama / 6 min

Directed by Elaine Wong
Born in Hong Kong and immigrated to San Francisco when she was in high school, Elaine graduated from UC Irvine in 2010, and held a Bachelor of Art degree in Literary Journalism. A 2nd year MFA candidate in Film and Television Production at USC, Elaine has worked with Scott Hamilton Kennedy, an Academy Award nominated documentary filmmaker, and now works in project development with Janet Yang, a prominent China-Hollywood Producer. Before she developed an interest in filmmaking, Elaine worked as a reporter at Sing Tao Daily. She is also a USC Annenberg California Endowment Health Journalism Fellow. As a writer director, Wong enjoys telling coming-of-age, romance, and Asian American experience stories.

Synopsis: Trista, a young ABC girl, has to come to terms with her own identity when Faye, her newcomer cousin from China, comes to live with her in America.

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Aviatrix: The Katherine Sui Fun Cheung Story

USA / 2015 / Animation, Documentary / 35 min

Directed by Ed Moy
Ed Moy is an award-winning journalist. He was recipient of the Leukemia & Lymphoma National Print Media Award in 2000. His animated short film Up in the Clouds premiered at the Catalina Film Festival and has screened at numerous film festivals. He covers Asian Pacific Entertainment on Examiner.com

Synopsis: Documentary about pioneering Asian Aviatrix Katherine Sui Fun Cheung, a Chinese immigrant who defied racial and gender bias to become a daredevil stunt pilot during the Golden Age of Aviation in the 1930s.

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Chinese Couplets

USA / 2015 / Documentary / 57 min

Directed by Felicia Lowe
Felicia Lowe is an award winning independent television producer, director, and writer with more than 35 years of production experience. “Chinese Couplets” is her latest work. Lowe received an EMMY for Best Cultural Documentary for “Chinatown.” “Carved in Silence,” a documentary about Angel Island Immigration Station has become a classic in educational circles and “China: Land of My Father,” a personal journey to China in 1979 to meet her paternal grandmother have garnered numerous awards and have been broadcast on PBS. Lowe was one of the first Asian broadcast journalist at KGO-TV. She has also taught film at SFSU and Stanford University and was a leader in the preservation of Angel Island Immigration Station.

Synopsis: “Chinese Couplets” is an intimate family story that reveals the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Acts on one family, over two centuries in three countries, on four generations of women.

FRIDAY: Comedy | Documentary | Open Submissions

6:00 – 10:30 PM

Irene Tu

Comedy Set / 10 min

Irene Tu is a stand-up comedian, writer, and actor. She was named one of the “Bay Area’s 11 Best Standup Comedians” in 2016 by the SFist and has been featured in numerous comedy festivals including SF Sketchfest, Limestone Comedy Festival, and Crom Comedy Festival. Irene hosts several popular shows in the Bay Area including Laugh Function, Man Haters, and Hysteria. She is also a co-producer of The Mission Position in San Francisco. You can follow her on Twitter @irene_tu or vist her website: www.irenetu.com

watch trailer

I Hate the Color Red

USA / 2015 / Drama, Comedy, LGBTQ / 19 min

Directed by Jazmin Jamias
Jazmin Jamias recently graduated from SFSU with a degree in Cinema with an emphasis in fictional filmmaking. Her last film, a short documentary entitled, The Altered Lives of LaVonne Salleé won two audience awards and two documentary awards and is currently part of the “Frameline Voices” program. She is interested in telling stories from a Filipino-American perspective. She is currently writing her next untitled project. She lives and works in the Bay Area.

Synopsis: A comedy about a sister and brother who inherit a video store who soon realize that because of “red boxes” and “red envelopes” that their store will soon become obsolete. They both deal with the demise of the store in their own way.

Sam Choy’s Poke to the Max

USA / 2016 / Documentary / 40 min

Directed by Terrence Santos
A Seattle based independent filmmaker, Terrence has collaborated on multiple projects including Narrative, Commercial and especially Documentary work. He was honored to find himself as a co-producer and cinematographer of the 2013 best of SIFF documentary THE OTHERSIDE. This project documented the rising hip hop music industry in the Seattle area from 2009-2011. Amongst those included in the film were the Blue Scholars, The Physics and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Terrence also held the position of Director of Content Development and Video Production for the University of Washington Athletics Marketing Department. This combined work experience has allowed him to further explore and raise his standards as a filmmaker

Synopsis: Godfather of Poké, Chef Sam Choy, was a major factor in Poké’s rise in popularity and now his Hawaiian food trucks have arrived in Seattle. Chef Choy shares how Poké is a true taste of Hawaii and how this distinctly Hawaiian dish has spread the Spirit of Aloha from the islands to around the world.

Rendezvous

USA / 2015 / Drama, Comedy / 14 min

Directed by Linder Pak; Christian Oh
Linder Pak is a writer and producer from the DMV. Her creative aspirations started in music, when she went to the Catholic University of America to study voice performance. She later realized that her love was not in music, but rather in storytelling. That’s when she turned her focus to screenwriting. Her feature-length script, Wedding Fever, has won an award for Best Screenplay for Romantic Comedy at the NOVA Film Festival, and placed third in the Cash Pot Screenplays. Her first film, Rendezvous, has been accepted to several film festivals. She also penned the webcomic, Dramatic Neutral. Linder is gearing up for another short film called, Pipe Dream, produced under her company, Cranky Peanut Productions.

Synopsis: A bumbling, middle-aged man goes on a dinner date with a woman half his age, but cultural misunderstandings keep him from connecting with her.

Right of Passage

USA / 2014 / Documentary / 98 min

Directed by Janice D. Tanaka
A producer, director and television execwith 30 years of experience in film and TV, Tanaka brings a wide range of experience to her work including recent productions “Right of Passage,” “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: The Life of Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga and “Act of Faith” the story of a Baptist minister in Seattle who dedicated his life to serving Japanese Americans. Tanaka continues to work as a script evaluator and producer of videos for clients such as the Japanese American National Museum.

Synopsis: American concentration camps. 120,000 victims, mostly US Citizens. their dramatic 45-year quest for justice.

Painted Nails

USA / 2015 / Documentary / 57 min

Directed by Erica Jordan and Dianne Griffin
Erica Jordan (co-producer) is an award-winning independent filmmaker whose documentary In Plain Sight premiered at 2014 Mill Valley Film Festival and won the 2016 Impact Docs Award. Jordan’s feature film Walls of Sand won Honorable Mention at Slamdance Film Festival and In the Wake, was selected by Film Threat as one of the best independent feature films of 2001. Dianne Griffin’s (co-producer) feature documentary White Hotel premiered at at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Film Society of Lincoln Center and was distributed worldwide by Jane Balfour Films LTD, London, England. Griffin enters unfamiliar territory, creating intimate connections and telling stories of dignity, suffering and compassion, which move us to act.

Synopsis: This timely film follows a Vietnamese immigrant’s life-changing journey from her vibrant nail salon to the steps of Congress, becoming the first person to testify for safe cosmetics in over 30 years.

SATURDAY: The Best of AOF

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11:00 AM – 12:30 PM

To Die or To Dream

USA / 2015 / Drama / 3 min

Directed by Peilin Kuo
Peilin Kuo is an award-winning writer/director born in Taiwan and based in New York. After graduating with a drama degree from her homeland, she worked for a production company in Taipei which made music videos, commercials, and television programs. She relocated to New York in 2002 and started to pursue her career as an independent filmmaker. Since 2004, Peilin has been making short films that have been screened in film festivals and winning awards. Peilin’s upcoming film “A Thousand Deaths” is a feature length biopic of legendary Asian American actress Anna May Wong (1905-1961).

Synopsis: Chinese American actress, Anna May Wong, is caught in a dark alternate celluloid reality. She relives her cinematic past over and over while deciding how she wants to be portrayed as an actress.

Mango Sticky Rice

USA / 2016 / Comedy, Musical / 15 min

Directed by Mallorie Ortega
Mallorie Ortega is a director, production designer, and food lover. More often than not, she will break out into song or make up a tune to her everyday living. She will be graduating from the USC School of Cinematic Arts earning her MFA in Film and TV Production. She enjoys designing highly imaginative worlds like scary basements, futuristic humanoid robots, and lightbulb growing trees. Most recently, she production designed a short film called When Pigs Fly, starring Glenn Howerton from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Fargo. Mallorie has been awarded Best Comedy, Best Ensemble, and Best Director at the Asians on Film Festival 2016. She was the only female to be nominated for Best Director at the First Look Film Festival 2016.

Synopsis: Katie, a food lover and very comfortable with her single life, is pressured by her friends and family to try online dating. Chris, a waiter at her favorite restaurant, doesn’t have the courage to talk to her, and watches her meet ups on the sidelines.

Locksmiths

USA / 2015 / Drama, Thriller / 15 min

Directed by James Kwon Lee
James is an LA-based writer-director who was born in England, lived in South Korea, and moved around the US, residing in 12 different cities across three continents. He graduated Duke University with a degree in biology. James has an MFA at USC Film School. He won the Thomas B. Bush Award for excellence in Cinematography and the Entertainment Partners Award for excellence in Producing. In 2015, former NatGeo CEO Howard Owens hired James to be a development producer at Propagate Content. James has since directed award winning shorts, commercials, and special projects, including an action previs sequence for an upcoming Kevin Hart and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson film.

Synopsis: Two robbers, posing as locksmiths, unknowingly break into the home of a killer who is in the middle of hiding his latest victim. The inevitable encounter leads to a series of terrifying incidents that culminates in a heart-rending reveal of the killer’s motive.

D.Asian

USA / 2015 / Comedy, LGBTQ / 10 min

Directed by Sarah Smith
Sarah Smith is a filmmaker and reality producer based in Los Angeles. She’s written for The Young & The Restless where she and her team won a WGA award for outstanding scripted daytime drama in 2013. She was also a writers’ assistant for the Emmy winning writing team of As the World Turns (2002, 2004, 2005), where she was invited to participate in the 2004 and 2005 Procter and Gamble writers’ workshop. In addition to her writing and producing work, Sarah edited the feature films Saint Janet and Armless, (an official selection to the NEXT category of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival). Sarah is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Synopsis: D.Asian is the story of a child seeking to clarify who he is in relation to those he identifies with most. It’s a timeless tale of that period in our lives when we crave the acceptance of our peers but regardless take a stand and for the first time say “no, THIS is who I am.”

Mooncake

France, Switzerland / 2014 / Drama, Foreign / 19 min

Directed by François Yang
François Yang is a Swiss-French director born in Fribourg (Switzerland), of Chinese descent. He graduated from ECAL (University of Art and Design, Lausanne), cinema department in 2003, and completed his education at la Fémis (French national film school) He directed several documentaries and award winning fictions exploring both cross-cultural and cross generational themes.

Synopsis: Alex is reluctant to celebrate the moon festival with his family, and would rather spend the evening with his French girlfriend. His heart is torn, however, when he rekindles his friendship with a childhood family friend.

Metamorphosis

USA / 2015 / Drama, Horror, Thriller / 10 min

Directed by Elaine Xia
Elaine Xia was born in Hong Kong but raised in mainland China. She is influenced by the two vastly different cultures and has always dreamed of traveling in time back to the 90’s Hong Kong. With her first independent short, “Metamorphosis”, she has achieved that dream. After graduating from high school, she entered New York Film Academy in Los Angeles in 2010 to study filmmaking. After working as an editor for several years, she decided to combine her interests in a new way. Inspired by her mother’s strength, Elaine has dedicated herself to creating horror and dramatic movies that showcase the darker sides of humanity, finding the beauty within in the process.

Synopsis: A woman in 1990s Hong Kong accidentally kills her alcoholic husband in self-defense, and finds a unique way to dispose of the evidence.

Finding Cleveland

USA / 2015 / Documentary / 10 min

Directed by Larissa Lam
Larissa is an award winning singer/songwriter born and raised in LA. Her single “I Feel Alive” won the 2015 Hollywood Music in Media Award and Akademia Music Award for Best Dance Song. She was named November 2015 Best Vocalist of the Month by SingerUniverse Magazine. After over a decade of starring in music videos, acting, and TV hosting, Larissa makes her directorial debut in this award winning documentary.

Synopsis: Finding Cleveland is a documentary short film that follows Charles Chiu and his family on an emotional journey as they take a trip to Cleveland, Mississippi to visit the gravesite of Charles’ father, KC Lou. In less than 48 hours, Charles has many surprising encounters with the local townspeople, who help fill in some blanks about the father he never knew. He also learns of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a discriminatory law against Chinese immigrants and the struggles his father faced in a pre-civil rights era.

SATURDAY: Drama

12:45 – 4:55 PM

Asian Representation In Film and Media

Industry Panel / 50 min

Join hosts Stephen Chun and Christina Lee with special guests Peter Kwong (Big Trouble In Little China), Hudson Yang (Fresh Off The Boat), Albert Tsai (Dr. Ken), Joz Wang (8Asians.com), and Baldwin Chiu (Finding Cleveland) for an open discussion on Asian representation in film, TV, and mainstream media.

Someone Else

USA / 2015 / Drama / 72 min

Directed by Nelson Kim
Nelson Kim received his MFA in Film from Columbia University. His short films have screened at Urbanworld, Anthology Film Archives, Palm Springs Shortfest, Asia Society, CAAMFest, and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. His feature screenplay CONFIDENCE MAN was a semi-finalist for the Netflix/Film Independent Find Your Voice Competition and a quarter-finalist for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Nicholl Fellowship. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, Kim is also a film critic, journalist, and teacher. He writes articles and reviews for Hammer To Nail, Senses of Cinema, and other websites, and teaches film as an adjunct professor at Columbia and Fordham. SOMEONE ELSE is his first feature film.

Synopsis: A shy young Korean American law student, hungry for a more vivid, risk-taking existence, visits his playboy cousin in New York City. In his quest to emulate his cousin, the law student sheds his old identity and journeys into the dark side of his own nature.

Hide and Seek

USA / 2015 / Drama / 4 min

Directed by Garth Kravits
Garth Kravits is a Broadway actor, singer, musician and composer and award winning filmmaker. On television, Kravits has guest starred on 30 Rock, The Blacklist, Nurse Jackie, Hostages, Tin Man and The Carrie Diaries and played opposite Keanu Reeves in the feature film Sweet November.

Synopsis: Hide and Seek is a short film that speaks to the societal challenge that women, and especially women of color, endure every day. To look in the mirror and to hope to see a face other than your own. One that is closer to what magazines, television and movies define as beautiful or even normal.

Frank and Kass

USA / 2015 / Drama / 7 min

Directed by Norbert Shieh
Norbert Shieh is a Taiwanese-American filmmaker exploring new perspectives on the everyday through delicate and formal observations. Based in Los Angeles, his films and collaborations as a cinematographer have screened internationally in festivals and venues, including Sundance, Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Ann Arbor, LA Asian Pacific Film Festival, CAAMFest and LACMA. Shieh is recipient of a 2012 Creative Capital Film/Video grant was a 2015 Visual Communication’s Armed With a Camera fellow. He holds both a BA in Visual Arts from UCSD and a MFA in Film/Video from CalArts.

Synopsis: Frank treks back home to his parents after recently being laid off with his young daughter Kass in tow. With their lives packed in a pickup truck, they drive across the California desert, hoping to make it to their destination in one piece.

The Sweetening

USA / 2015 / Drama, Sci-Fi / 20 min

Directed by Grace Rowe
After graduating UCLA studying Theater and Film, Grace started making films after adapting her one-woman show into an award-winning feature screenplay, “American Seoul.” She wrote, produced, and starred in the short film version which played at over a dozen film festivals worldwide. Grace then went on to write, star in, produce and edit the award-winning feature film, “I Am That Girl,” under her production company, Idylwild Pictures. “The Sweetening” is her directorial debut and is based off a feature film script she also wrote and is currently developing as a series. As an actress, you can see her on such hit t.v. series as “Black-ish,” “Modern Family,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Synopsis: A lonely and isolated woman falls for an avatar in a virtual reality program and it completely upends her life.

Persona Non Grata

Japan / 2015 / Drama / 139 min

Directed by Cellin Gluck
Cellin Gluck is a director known for Persona Non Grata (2015), Oba The Last Samurai (2011), Sideways – aka Saidoweizu (2009) and Lorelei (2005). As an assistant director/production manager he is known for Godzilla (2014), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Transformers (2007), Remember the Titans (2000) and Contact (1997) among others. Born and spending his ‘formative years’ in Japan and Iran, he believes his multi-cultural upbringing and his own diverse ‘composition’ provides an innate sensibility for things both Eastern and Western, allowing him to bridge cultures visually, viscerally and artistically as well as emotionally.

Synopsis: Against his country’s orders, Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara issues visas to refugees, saving over 6,000 Jewish lives at the outbreak of World War II.

SATURDAY: Documentary

6:00 – 7:50 PM

Racial Facial

USA / 2016 / Documentary / 9 min

Directed by Jeff Adachi
Jeff Adachi is the writer, director and co-producer of “Racial Facial.” He has been a social justice advocate and filmmaker, writing and directing two PBS award winning films, “The Slanted Screen: Asian Men in Film & Television” and “You Don’t Know Jack Soo”. Between 1995-1999, Jeff produced the Asian American Arts Foundation’s Golden Ring Awards. Jeff also serves as the elected Public Defender of San Francisco. His office provides legal representation to over 20,000 people each year, mostly of color. Through his legal work and activism, Jeff has always been a strong advocate for the civil rights of all Americans.

Synopsis: America Needs a Racial Facial is a short, 8minute film about race in America. It provides a blur of fascinating images and video – historical and contemporary – depicting both the division and blending that has characterized the history and treatment of people of color in this country.

Breathin’: the Eddy Zheng Story

USA / 2016 / Documentary / 61 min

Directed by Ben Wang
Ben Wang (Director/Producer) is a documentary filmmaker whose previous films include AOKI (Co-Directed with Mike Cheng, 2009 feature documentary film, which screened at SF Int’l Asian American Film Festival, Black Panther Party Film Festival, Chicago Asian American Showcase, LA Asian Pacific Film Festival, DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, Vancouver Asian Film Festival, and Boston Asian American Film Festival) and MAMORI (Director, 2013 short documentary film that screened at CAAMFest). Wang also co-edited “Other: an API Prisoners’ Anthology,” the first anthology of writings and artwork featuring API prisoners.

Synopsis: Arrested at 16 and tried as an adult for kidnapping and robbery, Eddy Zheng served over 20 years in prison. Ben Wang’s BREATHIN’: THE EDDY ZHENG STORY paints an intimate portrait of Eddy — the prisoner, the immigrant, the son, the activist — on his journey to freedom, rehabilitation and redemption.

My America…Or Honk if You Love Buddha

USA / 1997 / Documentary / 35 min

Directed by Renee Tajima-Peña
Renee Tajima-Peña is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose directing credits include the nationally televised documentaries, Calavera Highway (PBS), “The Mexico Story” of The New Americans series (PBS), My Journey Home (PBS), Labor Women (PBS), My America…or Honk if You Love Buddha (PBS), The Last Beat Movie (Sundance Channel), The Best Hotel on Skid Row (HBO), and Who Killed Vincent Chin? (PBS). Her films have premiered at festivals around the world including Cannes, San Francisco, Sundance, Toronto, and the Whitney Biennial. Tajima-Peña is a USA Broad Fellow in media arts, and a professor and graduate director of the social documentation program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Synopsis: In a rollicking ride across the changing terrain of American culture, Tajima-Peña recalls her childhood, back in the days when her vacationing family crossed five state lines without ever seeing another Asian face, and hits the road again to explore just how much the racial and cultural landscape of America has changed. Driving coast-to-coast, she seeks out what it means to be Asian American in our rapidly-changing society and comes across an ecclectic group of offbeat and distinctive people.

SATURDAY: LGBTQ

8:00 – 10:30 PM

Queer Vietnameseness

USA / 2015 / Documentary, LGBTQ / 51 min

Directed by Quyên Nguyen-Le
Quyên Nguyen-Le is a queer Vietnamese-American writer and filmmaker from Los Angeles. Recently, Quyên directed a film for James Franco’s The Labyrinth anthology and is a recipient of the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival’s 2016 directing fellowship for emerging media artists. Their first documentary, “Queer Vietnameseness” is a deeply personal project that began as a love poem.

Synopsis: “Queer Vietnameseness” follows the lives of three queer 2nd generation Vietnamese American women whose lives tell quintessential stories about the Vietnamese community in the U.S. challenging several dominant tropes in the mainstream Vietnamese refugee experience.

Front Cover

USA / 2015 / Comedy, Drama, LGBTQ, Romance / 87 min

Directed by Ray Yeung
Ray Yeung’s first feature film, CUT SLEEVE BOYS premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and won Best Feature at the Outfest Fusion Festival in Los Angeles. He has written and directed eight short films, including YELLOW FEVER, which won Best Short at the Madrid Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. A BRIDGE TO THE PAST was commissioned by the London Arts Council and recently PAPER WRAP FIRE won Best Short at the New Hampshire Film Festival. Ray has directed two plays, BANANA SKIN and THE THIRD SEX, which were staged in London and Hong Kong. As director and art director for Television commercials, he has worked for clients including 7 Eleven, Coca Cola, MacDonalds and HSBC.

Synopsis: A mature, nuanced drama that explores the relationship between two Asian men as they battle the cultural norms that keep them from living an honest, authentic life.

ABOUT SAPFF

The signature event of the Sacramento Asian Pacific Cultural Village, SAPFF serves alongside a continuum of events and programming in support of traditional and contemporary Asian and Pacific Islander artistic expression within the Sacramento Region. Since 2013, SAPFF has been a champion of independent films featuring the works of Asian Pacific Islanders in front of and behind the camera.

Facebook: www.facebook.com/AsianPacificFilmFest
Twitter: @SAPFF, www.twitter.com/sapff
Instagram: AsianPacific FilmFestival
YouTube: Sacramento Asian Pacific Film Festival, www.youtube.com/AsianPacificFilmFest
Flickr: sacramentoasianpacificfilmfest, www.flickr.com/photos/sapff

For more information about the Sacramento Asian Pacific Cultural Village, the Sacramento Asian Pacific Film Festival, or to see how you can get involved send an email to info[at]SAPFF.org, or call (916) 776-6036.

Lia Chang is an actor, a multi-media content producer and co-founder of Bev’s Girl Films, making films that foster inclusion and diversity on both sides of the camera. Bev’s Girl Films’ debut short film, Hide and Seek was a top ten film in the Asian American Film Lab’s 2015 72 Hour Shootout Filmmaking Competition, and she received a Best Actress nomination. BGF collaborates with and produces multi-media content for artists, actors, designers, theatrical productions, composers, musicians and corporations. Lia is also an internationally published and exhibited photographer, a multi-platform journalist, and a publicist. Lia has appeared in the films Wolf, New Jack City, A Kiss Before Dying, King of New York, Big Trouble in Little China, The Last Dragon, Taxman and Hide and Seek. She is profiled in Examiner.com, Jade Magazine and Playbill.com.