26th Asian American Film Festival

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It's fitting that John Wayne Wang is the chief honoree at the 26th San Francisco International Asiatic American Movie Festival. The manager made his name with Asian-themed movies such as as as "Chan Is Missing" and "The Joy Fortune Club," but have shifted effortlessly to Hollywood, where he directed Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes in "Maid in Manhattan" and Queen Latifah in "Last Holiday."

And yet, to acquire his passionateness undertakings made, such as his opening-night film, "A Thousand Old Age of Good Prayers" - about an Americanized girl whose father visits, disapprovingly so, from People'S Republic Of China - he must fall in military units with Asia for valuable partnerships.

"After working in Hollywood, it was like I had to relearn how to do films," Wang said at a festival news conference at the Sundance Kabuki last month. "I hadn't made an Asian-themed movie in 15 years, or an independent movie in quite a piece (2001's "The Center of the World")."

That sort of re-education is becoming more than commonplace. Across the United States, Asiatic film makers and histrions are not banking solely on Film Industry enlightenment or American money to recognize their dreams.

Actress Joan Chen, like Wang a San Francisco resident, have acted alongside Simon Peter O'Toole, Rutger Hauer, Saint Christopher Walken, Tommy Spike Lee Jones, Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine. Twenty old age after "The Last Emperor" won best image and established her as a star in the United States, she's logging frequent-flier miles to Asia and beyond - her public presentation in the festival's closing-night film, "The Home Song Stories," was turned in Down Under for Australian Chinese manager Tony Ayres.

"It is more than vivacious now," Subgenus Chen said of the Asiatic movie business. "And hopefully, in China, the censoring will go a evaluation system."

And Hollywood? Most of Chen's stateside work have come up in the independent arena.

"I did bend a couple of (American) independent movies down, but there aren't a batch of large studio offerings at all," she said.

Daniel Wu Dialect can relate. Max Born and raised in the Bay Area and a alumnus of the University of Oregon, Wu Dialect have go an A-list star in Asia. His Hong Kong-Chinese movie "Blood Brothers," a big-budget mobster saga, plays at the festival.

"Having lived there for 10 years, I experience more than Hong Kong than American," said Wu, who is scheduled to look at a panel treatment at the festival called "Crossing Over: Asiatic Americans and Asia." "Because basically my maturing old age have got been spent in Hong Kong. You see it from a third-party perspective, and you see it differently than we do."

Perhaps most dramatic about the up-to-the-minute tendency is the cooperation between independent film makers and Asia. Korean companies in peculiar are jumping into the fray; they have got poured important money into two New York-shot American independent movies with Korean subjects being shown at the festival: Michael Kang's "West 32nd" and Gina Kim's "Never Forever."

"Never Forever" especially demoes the duality between Asians and Asiatic Americans. White actress Vera Farmiga ("The Departed") plays a fictional character who is married to a Korean American man of affairs and is not able to acquire pregnant. To acquire the babe she believes will salvage their marriage, she enlists the aid of a Korean illegal immigrant, hoping to go through off any progeny as her husband's.

"It was a large asset to see something so audacious - if I may state - to see expressed sexual activity scenes between a White adult female and an East Asiatic man," said Kim, who was born in South Korea, taught at Harvard University and is now based in New York. Kim got her book to celebrated Korean manager Spike Lee Chang-dong, which proved to be a shot of good fortune.

"We got some money from Prime Entertainment, one of the greatest studios in Korea, and also got substantial money from the authorities - grant money from the Korean Movie Council," Kim said.

Other illustrations of East-West coactions include a absorbing docudrama about kamikaze pilots, "Wings of Defeat," in which Nipponese American Risa Morimoto is able to pull some surprising disclosures from former kamikaze-trained pilots. That Morimoto is American and female mightiness have got helped the work force - who dwell in a society that makes not promote candor - to open up up.

Anthony Gilmore might have got had a similar advantage when he spoke to former Korean sexual activity slaves in his "Behind Forgotten Eyes," narrated by Yunjin Kim - an actress who have bounced from Korean Peninsula ("Shiri") to Film Industry (the television series "Lost").

No wonderment festival manager Chi-hui Yang said at the news conference that he and his crew had thought better of dropping the "international" from the festival's functionary name, even though "it's one of the longer festival name calling out there."

Assistant festival manager Taro Goto is even going so far as saying Asiatic Americans now have got an advantage in some facets of the amusement field, thanks to the new paradigm. As he composes in an essay published in the festival program, "Their cross-cultural perspective gives them versatility and the ability to transcend national borders, which translates into both cultural and commercial value."

Lest you believe this is a new phenomenon, see the festival's retrospective programs.

Once again the festival is visited by Anna May Wong, the frequenter saint of Asiatic American crossing over movie artists. The Los Angeles-born actress who became a celebrated star in American soundless movies and shot to bigger celebrity workings in German and British soundless movies is the topic of a new documentary, Elaine Mae Woo's "Anna May Wong: Frosted Yellow Willows."

But most absorbing is the lawsuit of Sacramento-born singer-dancer Betty Inada, one of a moving ridge of Nipponese American wind people who became stars in Japanese Islands in the 1930s.

"Whispering Sidewalks" (1936), which plays Saturday at the Castro, was Japan's first musical.

Inada plays an American singer-dancer World Health Organization travels on circuit in Japanese Islands but is swindled by her managers. Penniless, she projects her batch with a grouping of struggling musicians, vocalizing songs such as as "La Cucaracha" and "Blue Moon" along the way.

More than 70 old age later, going planetary is solid once again for Asiatic American artists.

San Francisco International Asiatic American Movie Festival: Thurs.-March 23. Sundance Kabuki, Fidel Castro and Clay theatres in San Francisco; Pacific Ocean Movie Archive in Berkeley; and Camera 12 Cinemas in San Jose. (415) 865-1588, asianamericanmedia.org/2008. For G. Woody Allen Johnson's festival picks, travel to sfgate.com.

E-mail G. Woody Allen Samuel Johnson at ajohnson@ sfchronicle.com