A week-long presentation of Asian cinema
A Production of Pacific Arts Movement, presenters of the San Diego Asian Film Festival

Schedule of Events:

10:30 am - 107 mins - Yen and Ai-Lee

Kim Jiseok Award, 2024 Busan International Film Festival
Best International Feature, 2025 Santa Barbara International Film Festival

Yen is back home after serving eight years in prison for killing her abusive father. She and her mom take Yen’s reintroduction to the village a day at a time, sifting through job listings and re-encountering old classmates. But Yen’s introduction to mom’s new lover and to a half-brother she’s never met upends her homecoming and thrusts Yen back under the unshakable shadows of her father.

Those shadows and others dwell in the black-and-white mysteries of YEN AND AI-LEE, directed with signature emotional precision by Tom Shu-yu Lin (Starry Starry Night, SDAFF ’12, Zinnia Flower, SDAFF ’15). Featuring an award-winning performance by Taiwanese legend Yang Kuei-mei and a startling dramatic turn by comedy queen Kimi Hsia, Lin’s latest is an enigmatic film of uncanny doubles and a narrative puzzle of women re-defining themselves within cycles of violence and disappearance.

12:50 pm - 90 mins - Sunshine

Crystal Bear, 2025 Berlin International Film Festival, Generation 14plus
Official Selection, 2024 Toronto International Film Festival

Her name is Sunshine, and she’s on the verge of making the Philippine Olympic team as a rhythmic gymnast. The personal, national, and filial glory come crashing down with the unwanted discovery that Sunshine is also pregnant. Her struggle for a solution forward reveals society’s deep-rooted lengths to hold her back, when suddenly Sunshine is mysteriously met by a strange little girl with a knack for being wherever Sunshine happens to be.

Maris Racal navigates the title role with a dire grace. What hurts most, as director Antoinette Jadaone (Fan Girl, Spring Showcase ’21) spellbindingly ensures we know and feel, is that no part of Sunshine’s story is inconceivable at all. The external pressures surrounding abortion in Manila beat down like a biblical whipping. The internal fears which result bear the same textured scars as a nation touched by Catholicism as a colonial tool. But real choices and real beliefs are rooted in compassion, something Sunshine won’t ever let us forget.
2:50 pm - 113 mins - Baby Assassins: Nice Days

Official Selection, 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival

Look, girls just want to have fun. Even our favorite teenage hitwomen Chisato and Mahiro deserve a beach holiday and a nice steak dinner. But things get complicated when they show up for a job at the seaside town of Miyazaki and they are met by an uninvited guest: a freelance assassin who is trying to get to their target first. Reluctantly teaming up with a no-nonsense squad leader (former AKB48 star Atsuko Maeda) and a bumbling beefcake (former taekwondo athlete Mondo Otani), Chisato and Mahiro go on the hunt for the mysterious party crasher.

But these are the famed Baby Assassins, meaning as bloody as their fists get, there is still room for laughs. With their signature casual cool and anime twinkle, Chisato and Mahiro seem to be on permanent vacation, shooting bestie glances at each other even while shooting up bad guys. As they square off against their most formidable villain yet, they make us wonder who we should fear more: the deranged madman or the kawaii Gen-Z assassins too nonchalant to count their kills? The most action-packed entry into the Baby Assassins franchise manages to still feel like the nicest of days, with sea breeze, instant noodles, and friends.

7:00 pm - 76 mins - I Am a Ghost

 AM A GHOST is a haunted house story told from the other side: the perspective of the haunter. In this case, she’s an unknowing, accidental one – a ghost (played by Anna Ishida) in discovery of her identity, going through daily routines of cooking and mopping in a cycle of surprise, denial, and fear. A medium is hired by the haunted family to speak to her, in hopes that she can take her spectral footprints elsewhere. But acceptance is less acceptable when it means confronting a brutal past.

It’s an ingeniously simple conceit, and like all adventurous films, teaches us to watch the film as we go along. We follow disassociated images, not necessarily to piece together a puzzle, but to track a most uncanny experience as it becomes remembered, perceived, and forgotten in fractures. As he’s shown with his scores for Colma: the Musical (SDAFF ’06) and Fruit Fly (SDAFF ’09), H.P. Mendoza has an ear for sonic textures, and here applies them, in a collage of ambience, distortion, radio noise, dialogue, and silence, to dramatic and truly frightening effect.

As in those previous films, I AM A GHOST is playfully self-aware, digging into our love for haunted house films and 1970s tales of paranoia like Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. And within the rules of the genre, I AM A GHOST exorcises a most shocking and unusual specter: Asian Americans of an older San Francisco, haunting the present with repressed traumas that beg to be remembered. –Brian Hu

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