With a group of Asian film enthusiasts who call themselves Subway Cinema, Hendrix spends much of his time choosing films for the festival, which is in its fifth year. It began by showing the usual selection of Hong Kong, Japanese and Korean films. But - unusually for a festival of this kind - it has gradually added more and more films from India.

This year, it's showcasing four films from Indian action star Ram Gopal Varma, as well as hosting the US premiere of the latest Bollywood blockbuster, Krrish.

Hendrix, who lived in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, discovered Bollywood films on DVD. 'The first one I saw was terrible,' he says, with a laugh. 'But it featured a trailer for a film called Dil Se about terrorism. It really intrigued me, so I rented it. I thought it was amazing. It's a song-and-dance movie about a man who falls in love with a female suicide bomber. He tries to stop her, because he loves her. I found it truly moving. I've seen art films about terrorism like Paradise Now, but nothing has ever moved me as much as Dil Se. That's how I became a fan.'

The problem is finding a way to convey this enthusiasm to other Asian film fans, Hendrix says. Films from Japan, Hong Kong and Korea play to full houses at the festival, but few people show up to the Bollywood films. 'We've been disappointed with the turnout,' Hendrix says. 'There are a lot of bad Bollywood films, and audiences have usually seen one or two of them. That puts them off the genre. They think they're all sentimental romances. All Bollywood films have a romantic element, but the good ones have a lot more.

'We had to go through hell to get the films here. Most of the distributors in India aren't interested in film festivals. The films make lots of money in India and they're often satisfied to leave it at that. They can't be bothered exporting their movies. When they do play outside the country, they usually just go out on the expat circuit. Even when a producer wants to give us some films, it becomes a bureaucratic nightmare.

'It becomes problematic to get the film out of India. Customs have strict rules about exporting film prints for some reason, and the whole process takes ages. There's a lot of paperwork, so many producers decide not to bother.'

The same couldn't be said of films from East Asia. The festival has gained a good reputation for screening esoteric and unusual films from Japan. It's also a place where fans can catch up on all the latest Korean blockbusters. However, Hendrix says the frenzy over Korean films has waned in the US, mainly because of the bloated expectations of Korean distributors.

'The Koreans are still making good films,' he says. 'At one point, they thought that they could do well at the box office in America. That was always a false hope. A lot of Korean films got bought by distributors here, but they had to wait a long while to get released, if they got released at all. Now they've decided to concentrate on the Korean market.'

This year was the first that the festival didn't carry a film from Hong Kong. 'We really wanted to show Election, Election 2 and Isabella, but they've been bought by a distributor here who didn't want to give them to us,' Hendrix says. 'This happens a lot. Companies buy the rights to Asian films, and then sits on them for ages. Sometimes they don't release them at all. Meanwhile, Hong Kong companies aren't really interested in America any more. They're concentrating more on the pan-Asian market.'

It seems that Japan is one of the few countries with much enthusiasm left for festivals in the US. Japanese producers realise that festivals can help to build the reputations of directors abroad. They can thank horror director Takeshi Miike, says Hendrix. 'He was really nothing in Japan. His reputation was built through his success at foreign festivals. So now they all want to show their films. The Japanese make some very odd independent films that are good for our festival. They also make more mainstream fare, like the period drama Always, and we like to show that, too.'

Hendrix dismisses the so-called Asian wave in the US. After all, even relatively well-known films don't do well in the US. Ju-On - which spawned an American remake, The Grudge - took only US$325,000, and Park Chan-wook's well-regarded Sympathy for Mr Vengeance took a mere US$45,000.

'Asian films here always have a loyal audience, but the idea that there is an Asian wave of films that will succeed at the box office comes from overenthusiastic journalists,' he says. 'The reality is that most Asian films that open here die a horrible death at the box office.'

As for his beloved Bollywood films, Hendrix hopes they eventually will find a bigger audience in the United States. But they'll never have as many fans as films from Hong Kong and Korea. 'They're just too different.'