Below is a post done in June about the L.A. Film Festival, but there is no need to write something new (just edited the details) for the Hollywood Film Festival because basically it’s the same shit, different L.A. Festival…how sad this needs reposting.
As a site devoted to the promotion of the Asian-Hollywood film community, there is so much excitement and positivity that flows through our pages. Sometimes, however, it seems that the reality of Asian/Pacific Islander underrepresentation in the Hollywood film industry is glaring enough that we just gotta get out the soapbox (Scott pulls out the soapbox from under his desk…no dust on it)
Let’s begin by saying that to showcase films made by or featuring Asia-Americans for the sake of representation is not what we are talking about here. The point is that ignoring the community and the great films and acting that exist in the Asian-American film industry means a festival is just in the dark. We could name hundreds of film festivals that just ignore Asian-American films, but we expect a film festival in let’s say Whiteville, USA to skip anything that isn’t white. But when a festival in a place as diverse as L.A. does it, it’s just hard not to say anything. The Hollywood Film Festival coming up this month has so overlooked the Asian film community we were a bit shocked. We found one feature film and one short film directed by Asian-Americans and only found one Asian-American actors….sorry, did we mistakenly put an “s” on actor? This out of close to 55 films being screened…seriously!? We happen to know for a fact there are tons of amazing films by Asian-American filmmakers, so if they just needed suggestions we would have been very happy to help out.
Let’s be fair…we certainly could have overlooked some stuff, but it doesn’t change the fact that this film festival is missing something, namely, the Asian-American film industry. But since we like to keep things positive we applied for a press pass about a month ago (not a last minute thing) and figured we would be there to represent and to make sure Asian-Americans that WILL be at the festival will not only be heard, but will be showcased cuz we were gonna do it (we didn’t even bother to apply for The Hollywood Film Festival). It was a nice idea, but the festival denied us a press pass, so basically I guess they just confirmed how unimportant the Asian-American film industry is to their festival. (Scott shoves his soapbox under his desk hopefully to collect dust)
If you would like to contact the film fesitival to mention their amazing programming choices (or other comments) visit their website here: Hollywood Film Festival
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