Silence broken

The Asian-American Film Festival

by Peter Keough

"THE BOSTON ASIAN-AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL," At the Museum of Fine Arts, March 18 through 27.

It's not that Asian-Americans don't have as many problems as other minorities, it's just that they're quieter about it. That's one impression gathered from "The Boston Asian-American Film Festival," a series of features, documentaries, and shorts coming up at the Museum of Fine Arts. To judge from these films, however, members of those communities have a lot to say about the burdens of an often traumatic past and the conflicts of cultural identity posed by the present. They also have the insight, imagination, and talent to transform these issues into compelling cinema.

"It wasn't that the camps weren't bad," says one of the witnesses in Emiko Omori's The Rabbit in the Moon (1999; March 27 at 2 p.m.), an eloquent, revelatory, gracefully poetic inquiry into the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, "it's that they weren't bad enough." Not as bad, that is, as the camps of the Holocaust that came to light after the war. That may be one reason Japanese-Americans have been largely silent about this infamous episode, in which the federal government deprived them of their rights and property and relocated them from their prosperous West Coast communities to virtual prison camps. Another might be their desire to be assimilated and accepted as loyal Americans, regardless of the injustice they endured. The enduring image of this period has been of a long-suffering but forgiving people fighting heroically for their country in all-Japanese units such as the 442nd Regiment despite their ill treatment at home.

The reality is more complicated, points out Omori, herself a former internee. Weaving together eyewitness testimony, government propaganda films, home movies by internees, haunting images of the present-day remains of the camps, and a plethora of documentation, she shows how the internment policy ripped apart families, divided generations, and uprooted cultural traditions. And far from being meekly submissive, many protested the iniquitous conditions, resisted the draft, and refused to sign loyalty oaths that were precursors of those that cropped up during the McCarthy era. Adding poignance is Omori's delicate sharing of her own experience -- the rabbit of the title refers to the Japanese equivalent of the American "man in the moon," which, despite the insistence of her camp teachers, she persists to this day in seeing.

Even greater outrages are revealed in Dai Sil Kim-Gibson's Silence Broken (1999; March 20 at 1:30 p.m.); this time, the Japanese are the perpetrators. Unfortunately this investigation into the fate of the Korean "comfort women," teenage girls kidnapped by the Imperial forces in World War II to serve the sexual needs of the troops, doesn't do justice to its subject. The interviews with the aging, often infirm survivors of this atrocity, who have been unsuccessfully crusading since 1991 to get the Japanese government to answer for these crimes, are harrowing. The redundant attempts of the filmmakers to re-create the drama of their subjects' ordeals are not. However well-intended, these amateurish sequences confuse and trivialize the tragedy.

Historical trauma is better served in Quentin Lee & Justin Lin's Shopping for Fangs (1996; March 18 at 7:45 p.m.), despite or because of its winsome high jinks. Katharine, a young Vietnamese woman married to a macho corporate type, finds her colorless stability disrupted by amnesia and mash notes from a blond-wigged Asian waitress named Trinh. A free spirit with aspirations to lesbianism, Trinh gently stalks Katharine while befriending a gay customer jilted by his Hong Kong boyfriend. Meanwhile, Phil, a meek accountant, leads a life of quiet desperation until a bout with lycanthropy threatens to set him free. Lee and Lin blithely intertwine their discontented characters' lives in an alternately genial and jarring fable of repressed memory and identity in a society in which neither is valued.

A similar theme inspires Francisco Aliwalas's Disoriented (1997; March 25 at 6 p.m.). The ominously named West is the last hope of his smothering Filipino mother, who after enduring the disappearance of her husband and her elder son, Danger, slaves as a housekeeper in order to see West get into medical school. The mild West, though, is less than ambitious, and his discontent flares when Danger, a one-time macho jock with a football scholarship, returns home wearing a dress.

Further complicating matters is a struggling Japanese model who wants to have her eyes surgically straightened and an older Filipino named Speedy who counters hardship and prejudice with bromides like "Change is the only thing that is permanent." An agreeable farce with a too pat resolution, the film nonetheless lives up to its title in demonstrating that the burdens of the past and future, of social oppression and individual expression, persist regardless of one's orientation.