Group 4: Blog Post 2

Our group (group 4) decided to begin exploring CAAMFest by looking at its website and learning about their self-reported history. From there, we got excited about the period of time in the early stages of the festival, the 1980s, and dove deeper to understand how the festival first started and what decisions shaped the creation of the festival experience. We found through CAAMFest a picture of their very first festival program:

CAAMFest actually has its roots in “the government-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) began to provide greater funding resources with the specific aim of encouraging the development of ethnic media” (CAAM Media). Asian-American activists and scholars came together and created the idea for CAAM and CAAMFest as the best way to meet the government-funded mandate while still exploring Asian-American heritage, identity, and creativity. Thus, while government-funded, the organization purely exists to cultivate Asain-American media.

Initially, the festival wanted to specifically shine a light on the overlooked history and struggle of Asian-American people. This goal was made clear after looking at the films that were presented at the first film festival. The films presented all told stories of struggle surrounding certain political events in China. All films are aimed at showcasing Asian-American heritage and perseverance through media. 

Interestingly, we found through secondary sources that heritage played an even deeper role in the festival founding than we thought. CAAMFest also concerned itself with reaching the right people who would be most in need or interested in seeing these films. CAAMFest specifically picks areas in SF for screenings based on the ethnic population and where it will have the most impact: “According to festival director Masashi Niwano, festivals “curate the venue”... films thematizing the Chinese diasporic experience or Chinatown residents’ biographies may have what Niwano refers to as a “natural audience” in a Chinatown setting” (Erin Högerle). Many of the sources we found describe how the richness of San Francisco’s culture and Asian-American population make it the perfect place for this festival to take place. The festival is as intertwined with the city and its historic landmarks and theaters as it is with the encouragement of Asian-American voices.

Högerle’s essay on the relationship between film festivals and memory really highlighted the important role CAAMFest takes on with its commitment to keeping films alive and those experiences heard. One thing CAAMFest does in this commitment to heritage is that it makes films that have been otherwise lost to time available and screened through their program called the Out of the Vaults retrospective. Many Chinese and Chinese-American films have been screened purely for the purposes of recirculation of ideas and voices. For example, in 2014 they “presented two films by Chinese American filmmaker Joseph Sunn Jue which had not been screened in 67 years. As they become actively circulated memory, such films may open up to new meanings and interpretations” (Erin Högerle).

Upon learning about the goals of the festival itself, we wanted to dig deeper into how the festival was being perceived by audiences. A question we looked to answer while researching is as follows: Are the goals of the festival being met? We found a review of CAAMfest on the Film Free Way website where one user commented, “San Francisco is a historic site for Asian-American identity and to have the largest Asian-American film festival take place in the same area is monumental. Either as a filmmaker or as an attendee, I definitely want to come again” (Jeffrey Wu). Attendees appear to come out of this festival with a sense of pleasure over having Asian-American stories told on film. Additionally, they notably on their own connect the experience of the festival to San Francisco itself, showing how this festival has successfully created the environment it indented to with bonding with the landscape-- San Francisco itself has an active role in CAAMFest.

Sources:

Networks, locations and frames of memory in Asian American film festivals by Erin Högerle 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20004214.2019.1623631

Introduction: Travel, locatedness, and new horizons in Memory Studies by Maria Elisabeth Dorr, Astrid Erll, Erin Högerle, Paul Vickers & Jarula M.I. Wegner

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20004214.2019.1690840

CAAMFest’s own site’s recount of their first film festival year; CAAMFest’s first festival program photo

https://caamedia.org/blog/2015/02/25/inaugural-film-festival-1982/

Film Freeway’s audience reviews of CAAMFest

https://filmfreeway.com/CAAMFest