BAAFF is here!

The 7th annual Boston Asian American Film Festival starts this Thursday, October 22nd. It looks like there are only two films at this year's festival featuring Japanese American stories. Check out the other films here!

 

Shorts: Home in America

Six short films followed by Q&A with ​Directors Lucy Craft and Kathryn Tolbert and the director and producers of one of the other films.

Sunday, October 25, 2015, 1:00PM (tickets)

Bright Family Screening Room @ The Paramount Center, 559 Washington Street, Boston, MA 02111

Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides
Directed by Lucy Craft, Kathryn Tolbert and Karen Kasmauski (article)
2015 | 26 mins | Documentary

Despite lingering wartime enmity, tens of thousands of Japanese wives -- the biggest influx of Asian women in U.S. history -- crossed the Pacific. They began new lives in difficult and to them mysterious circumstances, scattered across the country in places where they were often the first Japanese ever seen. What was it like to abandon family, friends and country, and marry a former enemy? Even for those whose choice of spouse proved to be a tragic mistake, there was no turning back. Many in Japan viewed them as social outcasts and even today the words "war bride" in Japanese carry such a stigma -- of bar girls, even prostitution --  that people don't like to say them. Now these women are in their 80s. This is their story, of lives shaped by one irrevocable decision.

 

Off the Menu: Asian America

Sunday, October 25, 2015, 3:00PM (tickets)
Bright Family Screening Room @ The Paramount Center, 559 Washington Street, Boston, MA 02111

Directed by Grace Lee
2015 | 56 mins | Documentary

Off the Menu: Asian America is an exploration of food in changing communities, families, traditions, and faiths. In the one-hour documentary, Lee travels from Houston, Texas to New York’s Lower East Side, from Oak Creek, Wisconsin to Oahu, Hawaii seeking stories that reflect an evolving Asian Pacific America and the role food plays in peoples’ lives.

“We wanted to find unexpected stories that embodied the Asian American experience,” Lee said. “Asian America is already such a vast, complex, and contested idea. Focusing on food was a way to explore the deeper connections of culture, family, and ideas of authenticity and adaptation that link us all.”

Off the Menu features the story of sansei Glen Yoshiaki Gondo who is known as "the sushi king of Texas".