More good stuff happening tonight at SFIAAFF, including the indie-pop edition of the festival's annual music showcase, Directions in Sound. With performances from KIIIIIII, Scrabbel, Dreamdate and DJ Pickpocket. Tonight at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco.
As for films, there's David Kaplan's pseudo-animated modern Cinderella drama Year of the Fish, fresh from Sundance, as well as Socheata Poeuv's award-winning documentary New Year Baby, both playing at the Opera Plaza.
Over at the Van Ness, you've got films like Doan Hoang's Oh Saigon, a documentary about one Vietnamese refugee family's story. It's paired in the same program with the Hung Nguyen's deeply moving short documentary Going Home. There's also Nick Broomfield's Ghosts, a fictionalized account of a true 2004 tragedy, when twenty-three illegal Chinese workers drowned at England's Morecambe Bay. And on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, you've got Johnnie To's acclaimed Hong Kong crime drama Exiled, his semi-sequel to 1999's The Mission. Lots of intense looks and dudes with guns. Finally, there's Joy Dietrich's long-awaited feature Tie a Yellow a Ribbon, a drama about the complex emotional struggles of Asian American women, and one of the first feature films to address the alarmingly high rates of suicide and depression among Asian American women. That should keep you busy tonight.