From “Asian American Jesus,” one of the shorts that I screened with

One of the best things about going to a film festival as a short filmmaker is that you don’t have the same pressure and stress as a feature filmmaker who is constantly worried about promotion, publicity and packing your house. I attended the Vancouver Asian Film Festival a couple weeks back and really had a great time hanging out, meeting filmmakers and going to screenings because I was only showing a short film. Being relaxed and chill, I actually made a couple of discoveries at the festival that started off as a festival showing short films by North American Asian filmmakers.

My short screened in the same program with Yasmine Gomez’s “Asian American Jesus” starring performance artist Samantha Chanse who plays and satirizes multiple Asian American personalities. With intelligence and irreverence, Samantha pokes fun at the Asian American academic and arts scene. During the screening, I kept laughing out loud. I was unexpectedly surprised by how funny and ridiculous the short was.

After the screening, I because curious about Samantha Chanse who is based in the Bay Area. “Asian American Jesus” was developed out of her live performance piece Back to the Graveyard. I e-mailed Samantha and told her how much I enjoyed her work. Both Samantha and Yasmine (the director) e-mailed me back and said they have put the short on Youtube for the pleasure of everyone who didn’t catch it at the few festivals that they played.

From Yasmine, I’ve also learned that the short, as brilliant as I thought it was, faced some rejections from Asian American film festivals. It’s ironic that even Asian American festivals have now become selective and less inclusive than they were fifteen years ago when I first started going to film festivals. If Asian American festivals don’t support Asian American filmmakers… where would Asian American filmmakers go?

What I do find interesting is that there are indeed a lot more Asian American works, both features and shorts, now than when I first started. However, there are still very few outlets for Asian American works. There are the regional Asian American film festivals that are struggling to get an audience. But beyond that, there are virtually no commercial outlets for these works. Even in the past decade, only a handful of Asian American features got any type of commercial distribution.

Is Youtube our future? Perhaps Yasmine has done the right thing by putting her short on Youtube whose most bankable personality is nonetheless the Asian American Ryan Higa of Niga Higa fame.

At VAFF, I also caught up with writer/director Andrew Chung who was showing his short “Beauty Heart Story” before Desiree Lim’s The House. But really he was up at VAFF pitching and garnering interest for his TV series Millions that he just shot a pilot for.

I first met Andrew when he was a distribution executive at Horizon Pictures three years ago. Since leaving his distribution executive post, he moved to Toronto and decided to pursue his dream as a writer and director. Millions is the first thing that he produced as a writer/director.

Inspired by Justin Lin’s groundbreaking Better Luck Tomorrow, Andrew felt that there was a serious lack of Asian Canadian representation on Canadian television and he needed to do something about it. When I mentioned Dragon Boys, he rolled his eyes at the Orientalist series that he thought further perpetuated stereotypes of Chinese Canadians as Hong Kong gangsters uttering a jumble of bad English and Cantonese dialogue.

“I really want to show diverse representations of young Asian Canadians on Canadian television,” said Andrew. As a result, he self-financed, wrote and directed an 11 min. pilot for Millions which he planned to turn into either a 1-hour television series or web series. He showed me a sneak peek of the pilot that I thought was glossy and slickly done with a group of fresh Asian Canadian faces.

Although Andrew really felt like making it as a conventional TV series, I told him that the TV world is essentially an old boy’s club in the U.S. There are only a handful of show runners in the U.S. and it’s much easier to get a feature film made than getting a TV series off the ground. I was of course not sure about the Canadian scene. Andrew told me that there were only a handful of players and yes… it would be very difficult to get it off as a TV series. He had been trying for a couple of years.

Nevertheless, he still has hopes to make Millions into a conventional TV series while he is also pursuing the option of turning it into the web series. I honestly think that a web series is much easier to get off the ground. Again, look at Youtube. Asian Americans may not get a lot of representation in mainstream media, but they are all over Youtube and some, like KevJumba, Wong Fu Productions and Ryan Higa, are quite successful financially.

As a filmmaker, I wish Andrew the best and hope he succeeds in getting Millions off the ground. As artists and cultural producers, we know how hard it is out there and it’s simply an accomplishment to get anything done. And as much blood and sweat we put into our art, we never know how the audience will receive it.

So really, you have to be in it simply because you love doing it. Otherwise, what’s the point?