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

Schedule of Events:

April 25, 2025

7:00 pm - 94 mins - Opening Night Film
Out of Plain Sight

Opening Night Film, 2025 Slamdance Film Festival
Audience Choice Award, 2025 Santa Barbara International Film Festival

A scattered graveyard of corroded barrels is discovered across the deep ocean floor a short ten miles off the Los Angeles coast, well beyond the infamous chemical disposal sink now known as the Palos Verdes Shelf Superfund Site. The signs point once again to Montrose Chemical Corporation, an EPA Superfund Site itself and once the largest producer of DDT until 1982, 20 long years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

Like Carson, Pulitzer Prize-finalist and Los Angeles Times journalist Rosanna Xia resolutely ties together a collaborative investigation expressly for the public eye. From the front-page exposés comes the thoroughly Southern California documentary OUT OF PLAIN SIGHT, which fully and exigently understands itself as a partnership with us, the audience, and acknowledges that this is just the next chapter of a story that will not go away. With co-director Daniel Straub, Xia stirs the waters of an ill-contained societal past, a cinematic invitation to open our eyes to what we were never supposed to see.

April 26, 2025

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

April 27, 2025

5:30 pm - 108 mins - Village Rockstars 2

Kim Jiseok Award, 2024 Busan International Film Festival
Official Selection, 2025 Berlin International Film Festival

Seven years after we first met her, Dhunu is no longer a kid and she knows it. “I want to be small again,” she tells a friend. While she can roam the fields and climb familiar trees, she knows that growing up is around the corner, an adulthood she sees in her mother, herself older, and the other women of the village who tend the crops. There is no promise that what worked for a previous generation will work for hers. Corporations are creeping in from beyond the horizon. And her teacher reminds the class that increasing floods are the village’s top concern.

Yet, some things remain. Dhunu still harbors music dreams. The breeze still makes her smile. As external and internal worlds shift, director Rima Das lingers on these golden hour moments, and the window they open to the enduring lives of Assamese women: the tenderness between mother and daughter, the camaraderie between women in the fields, the friendships of girls approaching womanhood. There are rituals and ceremonies, goats and river leeches. All while Dhunu quietly imagines a life ahead. She once carved guitars out of styrofoam. Now, she will carve a future of her own. Like Das’ brilliant snapshot of her beloved Assam village, it will surely be luminous.

7:45 pm - 116 mins - Blue Sun Palace

Didi and Cheung share the kind of puppy love best experienced in the diaspora: a Taiwanese construction worker and a Mainland masseuse, stealing free hours to sing Faye Wong songs in karaoke. Meanwhile, Didi and her co-worker Amy share a different kind of love: a friendship bound by dreams of moving out of the shadow economy and starting their own restaurant together. A tragedy derails all plans though, and the unique numbness of being in between homes, families, friendships, and life stages envelopes those who remain.

As performed by Taiwan cinema veterans Wu Ke-xi (of Midi Z’s films) and Lee Kang-sheng (of Tsai Ming-liang’s), that numbness is never devoid of feeling. Their characters are yearning, romantic, and quietly proud, seeking nocturnal pleasures and never passing up the communal joys of a Chinese meal together. Director Constance Tsang finds these moments in stairways and backrooms, the makeshift palaces of Flushing immigrants with much self to discover despite much to lose.

–Brian Hu

April 28, 2025

5:30 pm - 108 mins - Village Rockstars 2

Kim Jiseok Award, 2024 Busan International Film Festival
Official Selection, 2025 Berlin International Film Festival

Seven years after we first met her, Dhunu is no longer a kid and she knows it. “I want to be small again,” she tells a friend. While she can roam the fields and climb familiar trees, she knows that growing up is around the corner, an adulthood she sees in her mother, herself older, and the other women of the village who tend the crops. There is no promise that what worked for a previous generation will work for hers. Corporations are creeping in from beyond the horizon. And her teacher reminds the class that increasing floods are the village’s top concern.

Yet, some things remain. Dhunu still harbors music dreams. The breeze still makes her smile. As external and internal worlds shift, director Rima Das lingers on these golden hour moments, and the window they open to the enduring lives of Assamese women: the tenderness between mother and daughter, the camaraderie between women in the fields, the friendships of girls approaching womanhood. There are rituals and ceremonies, goats and river leeches. All while Dhunu quietly imagines a life ahead. She once carved guitars out of styrofoam. Now, she will carve a future of her own. Like Das’ brilliant snapshot of her beloved Assam village, it will surely be luminous.

7:45 pm - 116 mins - Blue Sun Palace

French Touch Prize of the Jury, 2024 Critics Week, Cannes Film Festival
Official Selection, 2025 New Directors/New Films

Didi and Cheung share the kind of puppy love best experienced in the diaspora: a Taiwanese construction worker and a Mainland masseuse, stealing free hours to sing Faye Wong songs in karaoke. Meanwhile, Didi and her co-worker Amy share a different kind of love: a friendship bound by dreams of moving out of the shadow economy and starting their own restaurant together. A tragedy derails all plans though, and the unique numbness of being in between homes, families, friendships, and life stages envelopes those who remain.

As performed by Taiwan cinema veterans Wu Ke-xi (of Midi Z’s films) and Lee Kang-sheng (of Tsai Ming-liang’s), that numbness is never devoid of feeling. Their characters are yearning, romantic, and quietly proud, seeking nocturnal pleasures and never passing up the communal joys of a Chinese meal together. Director Constance Tsang finds these moments in stairways and backrooms, the makeshift palaces of Flushing immigrants with much self to discover despite much to lose.

April 29, 2025

6:30 pm - 100 mins - Soldier of Love

To the beats of the classic Kazakh rock band A’Studio comes director Farkhat Sharipov’s lavish moral tale of Beybut, a lead singer caught up in the seductions of fame. First comes the promise of going solo. Then comes the youthful dancer who catches his eye. With everything on the line, he takes the plunge into the limelight.

What sounds like a Kazakh “making the band” is actually a full-blown musical extravaganza, with the entire city of Almaty coming alive in color, dance, and spectacle. The 80s and 90s songs get a contemporary twist, and the choreography keeps pace with Beybut’s rise with the ease of a music video and the inventive contemporary flair of La La Land.

8:40 pm - 113 mins - Baby Assassins: Nice Days

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.

–Brian Hu

April 30, 2025

5:30 pm - 90 mins - Sunshine

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.

7:30 pm - 85 mins - Lucky Star

Dad is a reformed gambler, but the relapse is coming. He has secret cash stacks around the house, and he’s borrowing money from his college-aged daughter. A speeding ticket accelerates his cravings. A breaking point is coming. And his name is Lucky, which might be the greatest curse of all.

He’s played by an excellent Terry Chen, who rocks tattoos of old glory days and drives a sports car bought in better times. Gillian McKercher’s tense drama captures the gambler’s daze, but more impressively, the fate of a man who doesn’t know how to accept help, be that financial or emotional, from the people who are the real fortune in his life.

9:40 pm - 90 mins - Mystery Kung Fu Theater

In life, we make mysteries. In death, we make theater.

May 1, 2025

5:00 pm - 100 mins - Soldier of Love

To the beats of the classic Kazakh rock band A’Studio comes director Farkhat Sharipov’s lavish moral tale of Beybut, a lead singer caught up in the seductions of fame. First comes the promise of going solo. Then comes the youthful dancer who catches his eye. With everything on the line, he takes the plunge into the limelight.

What sounds like a Kazakh “making the band” is actually a full-blown musical extravaganza, with the entire city of Almaty coming alive in color, dance, and spectacle. The 80s and 90s songs get a contemporary twist, and the choreography keeps pace with Beybut’s rise with the ease of a music video and the inventive contemporary flair of La La Land.

7:15 pm - 96 mins - Between Goodbyes

Born in South Korea as Miok, Mieke was raised in the Netherlands by her Dutch single adoptive mother, a continent away from a family she never had the chance to know. Mieke’s birth parents didn’t have the resources to take on another child, so they, like 180,000 other Korean parents, were nudged by the South Korean government’s population policies to put their child up for international adoption.

In the years since, Mieke has overcome loss, found community in church, and discovered queer love, all while her birth parents have dreamed, from an ocean away, about the woman she may have become. So one Christmas, they send their Dutch child a Christmas card to say hello, and to apologize, beginning a decades-long process of reunion.

BETWEEN GOODBYES follows Mieke on a trip to South Korea to celebrate her marriage and reflect on parents and siblings who have, with each goodbye, etched an indelible hole in her heart. Director and fellow Korean adoptee Jota Mun reveals the difficult but transformative process of reunification, giving hope to those on both sides of the sea, as they discover their own identities between self and family.

Date: April 25 - May 1, 2025

Location: UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley, 7510 Hazard Center Drive San Diego, CA 92108

Click here to Buy Tickets

Click here for more Information