saturday at the los angeles asian pacific film festival

All right, the 25th Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival is in full swing! The Opening Night screening of Tze Chun's Children of Invention was a blast, and Friday night was packed with a solid schedule of screenings. And there is almost too much good stuff happening on Saturday.

You could go to the shorts program Life Beings At..., which includes A Green Mountain in the Drawer and Recollections, two of my favorite short narratives in this year's festival. There's also Passion of the People, which includes Tad Nakamura's A Song For Ourselves and Jessica Yu's The Kinda Sutra -- both really excellent documentaries.

Of course, you can't miss the Festival Centerpiece Screening of So Yun Kim's Treeless Mountain. Then there's the documentary I'm most interested in checking out, Christopher Wong's Whatever It Takes, which chronicles the struggles and triumphs of one year at the Bronx Center for Science & Mathematics in New York.

There's also Anna Chi's Dim Sum Funeral, which the festival is billing as the "Saturday Showcase Movie." It stars Kelly Hu, Russell Wong, Julia Nickson and none other than Bai Ling... all who will be in attendance. No joke.

Finally, I want to throw out a big plug for the festival's special retrospective screening of Christine Choy and Renee Tajima's Academy Award-winning documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin?, which examines the landmark 1982 murder case that galvanized the Asian American activist community. I think I can honestly say this film changed my life.

If you haven't seen it, you need to get schooled. The screening is Saturday, May 2, 4:00pm at the Directors Guild of America. This film is not readily available on home video, so you usually have to catch it in educational screenings and Asian American studies classes. Make your plans, grab a friend and try to make an effort to get to the DGA on Saturday afternoon.