Group 1 Blog 5
Chinese Cinema in the Bay Area Research Project: Group 1 Blog 5
Remaining Questions, Obstacles, and Conclusions: Center for Asian American Film Festival (CAAMfest)
Jessica Nye, Grisis Yu, Katie Scarlett Day, Ryan Wexler
At this current stage in our project, we had found the most success through primary resources, so we decided to reach out to CAAM once more to see if we could find out more about the programming, funding, and marketing history and how all of their special events have connected over the years. We reached out to Frances Pomperada, the current Director of Development at CAAM, to ask if she had time for an interview or if she could answer questions over email. Unfortunately, Ms. Pomperada was too busy to commit to an interview due to planning for a signature event in May, but she recommended contacting Eddie Wong, the former CAAM Executive Director from 1996-2006 before Stephen Gong, and included his email address in her message. This was an especially exciting breakthrough as we had already learned of Mr. Wong’s notable achievements through newspaper articles (such as his time at UCLA and his work with the Rainbow Coalition and his first-hand experience with helping to save NAATA’s funding). We reached out to Mr. Wong shortly after, and asked if he was available for an interview or to answer any questions over email. He first recommended we speak to a former long-standing festival director, Chi-hui Yang, and also said he would be happy to chat with us. Mr. Wong was not available to join an interview until May 9th, because of his work on the commemoration of the 140th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act, but thankfully we will be able to add some insight from that interview into our final project report before it is due. Here are the questions we asked Eddie Wong and his responses:
Can you tell us a little bit more about your time working with Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition, your transition to NAATA, and your goals to advocate for Asian Pacific Americans?
My beginnings in media go back to Los Angeles and the film program, UCLA’s Visual Communications. So it was like a groundbreaking recruitment of third world students to the film school, so that was 1970, way before you were born! So I was a filmmaker, I was a documentary maker trained at UCLA, and out of college a group of us formed Visual Communications. It was a collective, it was a collaborative of filmmakers all Asian American, many of us came out of UCLA film school, Robert Nakamura, Duane Kubo, and then Alan Ohashi was a graphic artist and later he went to film school as well. And people like Betty Chen who was our teaching assistant at UCLA, we were all part of making media projects together. And so we did everything from story books for kids, shooting still photography, to doing over a dozen short 16 mm films for elementrary, middle, and high school, funded by grants from the US office of education. So my background before NAATA really was in media, so I was with Visual Communications for about nine years, writing proposals, directing films, we all collaborated so we worked on eachother’s films in different capacities. So I did that, and then I went into community organizing and moved to the Bay, and then from that I got involved with the Jesse Jackson campaign in 1984 and got a good nine years with him on various campaigns and organizing. But I got sort of exhausted from that, I was traveling with him. So for a year I was never home, I lived in a hotel, just from city to city. And I wanted to settle down, my oldest daughter was born at that time, in 1988, during the presidential campaign, so it was time for me to come home. I actually did a bunch of other organizing for him while in California, and then I think in 1996, I think Deann Borshay who was my predecessor at NAATA, decided to stop being the Executive Director and go full time into filmmaking herself, and she’s become quite an accomplished documentarian. So I started working as Executive Director of NAATA in 1996, it was still relatively young and getting funded from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to create documentaries and short films for PBS. And we had the film festival going on, but in those days, the film festival was really underfunded, we were scraping by trying to put together a 7 day festival. But again we had really talented and dedicated staff and curators and our festival directors, we really sought to include films from Asia as well as films made by Asian Americans. So that’s kind of how it started for me.
While becoming Executive Director of NAATA in 1996, how did you save NAATA from Congress’s plan to change funding for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, were there other sources of funding you looked into?
Well I think it’s kind of overstating to say I saved it, you gotta understand that the republicans tried to eliminate funding for the corporation for public broadcasting, National endowment for the arts, National endowment for the humanities, almost every session. I mean it’s like, this is their thing, they don’t believe that there should be public media, because they only want private media, ignoring the fact that most countries in the world have really robust public broadcasting systems especially in Europe - Germany, Britain, France. So it’s a constant fight every session, and luckily the democrats, and quite a few republicans actually, love Big Bird. You know, they just love Sesame Street, I think Sesame Street is what saves Public Broadcasting. So yeah, we would have to protest and we would have to go lobby in Washington, I went to Washington a lot in those days to meet with Congress people and do all that. But basically, there aren’t many places to get funding to do independent documentaries and public broadcasting films. There are some foundations, and obviously some filmmakers will get individual grants from foundations. Some foundations support the media arts centers like NAATA and the rest of the national minority consortia, and so they’ll give some operating funds. But it’s not longlasting. Whereas the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it’s funded by Congress every year, and so as a result of their funding, a portion of it is given to support independent filmmakers. We are the grants-making entity who gets funded, how much, so on and so forth. That’s been the anchor keeping NAATA and CAAM going, a sizable portion of their budget is actually from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It pays for the majority of the staff. There’d be support from the California Arts Council, the Ford Foundation, other entities like that. We also have a membership for NAATA/CAAM and so we do donor events to make money and ask people to join - so that’s a small portion of the budget but still important.
CAAMFest appears to be centered around its annual film festival in May each year. How do the directors and marketing team decide other events to include each year (film anniversaries, special in-person screenings, guest panels, etc.)?
Back in the late 90s, the festival was actually in March, so we were early in the calendar because in San Francisco there’s a rolling calendar of festival, so you don’t wanna bump up against the San Francisco International Film Festival, the big daddy on the scene, I mean it’s a huge festival, and there’s all kinds of smaller festivals as well. So March became a sweet spot where we would be the only festival playing at one time. And so it wasn’t till more recently in the last few years that CAAM switched to May, which made a lot of sense because it’s Asian Pacific Heritage month, but you know, we would also schedule film screenings in May, back when I was at NAATA because it was Asian Pacific Heritage month and because it coincided with films coming to broadcast from PBS. So in order to promote the broadcast we would do screenings, panels, etc. It was just an ongoing discussion among the staff about when to do screenings, and sometimes, if there was a film from Asia that was about to be released in the US and they wanted a showcase in San Francisco we would ask and beg to be the organization to host the filmmaker, do the screening, so it was an ongoing process.
What have been your main goals after being Executive Director at CAAM? Would you be able to tell us a little more about your work organizing the commemoration of the 140th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act?
I think while I was at CAAM it was just nurturing a body of Asian American work, so this year the film festival is in its 40th anniversary, so that’s quite an achievement. We went from a handful of films, to hundreds of films, so that just shows the growth of not only Asian American cinema but cinema from Asia has really risen in prominence, and we were proud to be a part of that. And credit goes to the curators, people who really nurtured the festival through all these iterations. I think overall, our goals were to make sure the Asian American story didn’t get lost either, so we were really proud to get productions that we had partially funded onto PBS series such as Independent Lens, POV, so I think those are the things we are most proud of having accomplished, getting those stories out there. And quite a few Asian American filmmakers now are pretty well established and continuing to produce really important work. I left NAATA after nine almost 10 years, because I felt I had done all I wanted to do there, you know. Kinda built an organization, produced a series for PBS called Searching for Asian America, the first national series, so I’d done a lot of the things I wanted to do and I wanted to try a lot of different things. And I went into other work, I went into organizing work again, did some donor advising, major donors through the Democracy Alliance. But I actually ended up coming back to the community, things like the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, which preserves the historic immigration station in the Bay. But since that time, I’ve been retired for like 10 years, so I’ve been doing different things you know, so one of the things I do is a blog called eastwindezine.com, it’s sorta like a magazine format. But I have a hard time finding writers, so I end up writing a lot of it myself, and a few other people contribute quite often. So I think out of that work I have a sense of wanting to promote Asian American artists, art and culture, political issues are very important to me. So five years ago, a group of us did a big rally in Portsmouth Square called “No More Exclusion”, and that was at the 135th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act. So five years later we’re at the 140th and we’re like, we have to do something, it wasn’t the same. Five years ago we were outraged by President Trump, I almost hate to say the ‘President’, but Trump and his anti-immigration policies, so we felt we had to do a big rally. And we did, we had a couple thousand people in Portsmouth Square. This time, it’s a more reflective event where we’re living in this long shadow of Anti-Asian violence that doesn’t seem to end, and yet, people still don’t readily know what the Chinese Exclusion Act was all about – you know, why did we do this, why did we exclude an entire nation of people, workers, from coming into this country and what is the legacy, what is the historical trauma of it? So I’ve always been kinda interested in those topics, so luckily organizations in Chinatown, like Chinese for Affirmative Action, Chinese Cultural Center, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, the new group CMAC, Chinatown Media and Arts Collaborative, all these people came together and we just tried to raise a little bit of money and put on this event. We actually started Friday with an event at Angel Island, a wreath laying at the Chinese immigration monument, and then in the evening there was projections on the walls of Building C at Fort Mason, and then we did our event on Saturday. The ceremony was called “In Honor of Our Belonging” and it was reading allowed 140 names of Chinese American ancestors as a symbol of all the people who had gone through that exclusion era. It was quite moving, I’ll send you the clip. I’m retired, I do projects I like, you know, I continue to write about politics, so, I don’t know where it’s gonna end!
Eddie Wong, Jessica Nye, and Ryan Wexler in the interview
Mr. Wong shared his blog Eastwind with us, and we were able to find a picture of him alongside Rev. Jesse Jackson on the campaign trail in Porstmouth Square (second from right)
He also shared with us a video of the recent ceremony commemorating the 140th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act held in San Francisco Chinatown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEhvCBK3M9E&t=56s
Here is a flyer from the commemoration of the 140th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act that Mr. Wong sent us:
We did end up reaching out to Chi-hui Yang, a former CAAM festival director, and he replied that he would prefer to answer questions over email. We sent him the following questions about five days ago, however, he is very busy at the moment, and we are unsure if he will respond by the due date tomorrow. Despite that, we are still very intrigued to find out his answers to these questions:
The class I am in at UC Berkeley is titled Chinese 172: Contemporary Chinese Language Cinema, and the main goal of our research project is to research how Chinese (or more applicable Asian-Pacific Islander) cinema has been presented through a specific space, venue, or program in the Bay Area (in this case CAAMfest). How has Asian-Pacific Islander representation in this festival changed throughout the years?
You’ve contributed to documentary work through many different organizations, including CAAM and more recently JustFilms with the Ford Foundation. How did your role as a festival director at CAAM compare to your other roles as a teacher, curator, program officer, and more?
CAAMFest appears to be centered around its annual film festival in May each year. How do the directors and marketing team decide other events to include each year (film anniversaries, special in-person screenings, guest panels, etc.)?
What was your role in making programming choices for the festival and how did you collaborate with the other festival directors? (I had the chance to speak with Stephen Gong, the Executive Director of CAAM, how did your work overlap with his?)
What was the most important/fulfilling aspect of being a festival director at CAAM?
What are your future goals for yourself in this field of work or for programs like CAAM?
If Mr. Yang does manage to find time to respond, we will gratefully add some insight from his answers to the final report tomorrow. However, we completely understand his busy schedule and that he has many other more important priorities at this moment.
We were slightly unsure how to move forward so we talked with our professor Linda Zhang for ideas for this last final push. She gave us advice and recommended going more broad with our research, such as finding more secondary sources that included the history of Chinese film in the US or film festivals in the Bay.
We followed up on the professor's recommendations to search for some secondary sources as our group has explored a variety of primary sources.
A lot of the secondary sources, either vaguely mention CAAMfest, or have a small paragraph about the festival itself. Additionally, one of the sources ( Asian Films on Bay Area Screens) describes different Asian films that were films and featured the Bay Area. Another goes into detail about the film industry in China, and one of the other sources talks about API and the representation of API on screen. There are links and citations for anyone that is interested!
https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/CAAMFest-opens-with-film-featuring-San-Jose-native-5232149.php
Peer reviewed from UC Berkeley Databases and Google scholar:
Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey. "What Was Asian American Cinema?." Cinema Journal 56.3 (2017): 130-135.
https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02171572/document
Taillibert, Christel. "Online Film Festivals: New Perspectives for Film Festivals on the Internet." (2018).
https://digital.sandiego.edu/dissertations/151/
Jiang, Yang. "Seeking Mirrors: Representation and Identity at Asian Pacific Islander Film Festivals." (2019).
Leung, Wing-Fai, and Sangjoon Lee. "The Chinese film industry: Emerging debates." Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13.3 (2019): 199-201.
Skinner, Margo. "Asian Films on Bay Area Screens." Asian Week (1983-1989), Sep 18 1987, p. 24. ProQuest. Web. 8 May 2022 .
In conclusion, during this semester, we delved deep into our research on CAAMFest, which was a very memorable and meaningful experience for our group. As I now begin to recall the information I researched this semester, it suddenly brings back a comment the Professor made in a class I took last semester about Chinese performance culture in the Bay Area, specifically film and theater. I remembered the professor saying that Lei had also mentioned in her article that "performing Cantonese opera becomes an efficacious process of recalling a 'home' that always exists in the beautiful past and across the Pacific (Lei)", she was talking about the nostalgia brought by Chinese art and culture ——i.e. The ways that Chinese opera and films present in this moment an idealized version of the past for members of the diaspora who associate that past with their shared Chinese identities. But it’s important to recognize that Lei herself doesn’t want us to think of China as always stuck in the past —— and of course the other side of that nostalgia for an idealized China that she sees being enacted om early Chinese art culture, especially Cantonese opera, is the ways in which the current Chinese Americans she’s interested in identify with a very present—— or even future-facing—— China: the China that is a growing economic and global superpower. I think this passage adequately summarizes and comments on my thoughts about the project I researched this semester (The professor is saying something similar, and may be partially off, but that's basically what I'm trying to convey).
Overall, to go along with this, we have learned that most importantly, through its marketing and programming choices, CAAM’s main goal is to represent Asian Pacific Americans and tell meaningful stories to inspire future generations. It’s been very insightful to learn more about such a rich and complex film festival, excited to see how the festival goes in the coming days/weeks!
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