For 30 years, the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival was saddled with an unwieldy moniker and an un-catchy acronym, SFIAAFF (pronounced SFEE-ahf). At some point, friends and I just started calling it "The Asian." Now, for what would have been its 31st edition, SFIAAFF has rebranded itself CAAMFest and expanded its focus as a "world class festival of contemporary Asian American creative expression in film, music and food." (CAAM, for those just tuning in, is the Center for Asian American Media, parent organization of the festival.) While we at film-415 appreciate music and food as much as the next movie-goer, our interest in this year's fest remains squarely on new works by emerging and established Asian auteurs.
Fortunately, there's a lot to more admire in Beautiful 2012. The program begins with You Are More Than Beautiful from South Korean director Kim Tae-Yong, best known for the schoolgirl ghost movie, Memento Mori. In this playful and moving narrative, a spunky actress is hired to portray an irritable young man's fiancé. He brings her to a hospital to meet his dying father, but they arrive too late. Or do they? Tsai's Walker appears second and is followed by Gu Changwei's Long Tou. Gu is a renowned cinematographer who shot films for China's top directors (Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum, Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, Jiang Wen's Devils on the Doorstep). His short is the most disjointed and enigmatic of the bunch, a cryptic condemnation of China's past, present and, in the film's final shot, an apocalyptic future. Beautiful 2012 draws to a close with Ann Hui's My Way, an interesting enough portrait of a MTF transgender's travails starring famous Hong Kong actor Francis Ng.
Elsewhere in the CinemAsia sidebar, adherents of experimental Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul won't want to miss Mekong Hotel, a languorous 57-minute featurette full of the filmmaker's trademark themes (reincarnation, troubled ghosts) and stylistic devices (the film ends with a static, 6-minute shot of Mekong River jet-skiers observed from a great distance). While I enjoyed Mekong Hotel, I'm not aching to see it again – something I couldn't say about Weerasethakul's previous works. South Korean director Meul O's debut film Jiseul tells of a little known incident in which the army – at the instigation of the U.S. – massacres an entire island village wrongly suspected of being communist sympathizers. Jiseul's narrative makes regular switchbacks between the occupied village, where several soldiers are tortured or killed for refusing to obey orders, and the villagers hiding in forest caves. The film, which won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema at Sundance, is a bit murky in conveying historical 
and political context (awkward subtitles don't help), but the stunning wide-screen B&W cinematography is not to be missed. Then in Sion Sono's The Land of Hope, we witness the calamitous effects that a fictional, Fukushima-like nuclear disaster has upon one family. It's an effective, straightforward and heartfelt drama that can't help but seem lame when held up to the outlandish creativity of Sono's previous work (Exte: Hair Extensions, Love Exposure, Cold Fish.)Two remaining CinemAsia films I previewed offer unflattering views of life in contemporary China. Sixth Generation director Zhang Yuan hit the scene 20 years ago with the scrappy Beijing Bastards and is considered China's first "indie" filmmaker. In his more accomplished recent work Beijing Flickers, a suicidal young man and his circle of quirky, societal misfits struggle to find a place in an unkind world. The film possesses a wanna-be Wong Kar-wai vibe of handsome photography and rambling voiceover. It also starts to feel pointless and interminable toward the end of its 96 minutes. The thing zips by, however, compared to Ying Liang's austere, 70-minute docu-drama When Night Falls. I'm at a loss to explain the heap of critical praise this film has received, as I was when Liang's ham-fisted feminist polemic The Other Half screened at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival in 2007.
When Night Falls is based on a famous case in which a young man murdered six Shanghai policemen as retribution for alleged maltreatment during an arrest for unregistered bicycle possession. The real scandal is that his mother was promptly abducted by officials and held in a mental hospital for 143 days and it is her story upon which the film focuses. Following release, her efforts to visit her son and assemble a case in his defense are repeatedly thwarted, and media attention becomes an unwelcome distraction. Then one day she learns that he has been summarily executed without notice. The film attempts to re-enact her story and it should have made for an intensely compelling drama, but for whatever reason Liang focuses mainly on extraneous non-events, such as the mother's efforts to regain entry to her apartment after locking herself out, her search for a store with a functioning copy machine, filling out post office forms and other inanities. Critics have called the film a heart wrenching indictment of China's criminal justice system. When Night Falls is also cold, plodding, butt ugly and it completely failed to move me. There's a stunningly powerful image in the final scene that arrives much too late. Non-pro actor Nai An won a Best Actress prize at last year's Locarno Film Festival, as did Liang for Best Director. In his write-up for The New Yorker, Richard Brody explains why he considers this film – and Liang's The Other Half – to be masterpieces. See and judge for yourself.
Here's a brief rundown of a few other possible CAAMFest 2013 highlights:
Memories to Light: Asian American Home Movies is a new CAAM initiative that seeks to "recover and make accessible a moving image record of the Asian American experience through home movies." The first official program of the series will be presented by acclaimed local filmmaker Mark Decena.
After taking last year off, the festival's Out of the Vaults presentation returns with a screening of The Monkey King: Uproar in Heaven, which has gone through a frame-by-frame restoration and 3-D rendering. This film from the early 60's is generally considered China's greatest work of animation and was released shortly before the Cultural Revolution shut down China's film industry
