Hollywood has never been an easy place to be Asian. For most of the 20th century, the only Asians on the silver screen were subservient geishas, smouldering dragon ladies, stuttering waiters or evil Fu Manchus. Sometimes they weren't even played by Asians, but by Caucasians with their faces painted yellow. They were two-dimensional stereotypes at best, and always branded as mysterious and alien.
But in 1979, Hong Kong-born filmmaker Wayne Wang began a low-budget movie set in San Francisco's Chinatown. Shot on modest 16mm black-and-white film, it starred both professionals and locals and represented Chinese as real people. Its release in 1982 as Chan is Missing was a rallying cry for a new movement: Asian-American Cinema.
This month, the first Asian-American Film Festival premieres in Hong Kong, and demonstrates just how far this revolution has come. Sponsored by the Hong Kong America Centre and New York's Asian Cinevision, an extensive programme of four features, 19 short films and several academic talks will take place at eight universities in Hong Kong and Macau during the coming months, covering a dizzying array of genres, cultures and concerns.
From the polished indie hit Saving Face (starring Joan Chen) to a quirky, digital-video musical (Colma: The Musical) and all the shorts in-between, the festival aims to explore the complexities of the term 'Asian-American'.
Festival co-ordinator Cindy Wong Hing-yuk, a professor in media culture at the City University of New York and currently a Fulbright fellow at City University of Hong Kong, says it's meaningful for Hong Kong students to understand more about Asian-American identity.
'I think this isn't a familiar concept in places like Hong Kong, with a homogenous population, where if you don't look Chinese, you're not 'Hong Kong',' she says. 'In the United States, it's a different story. Granted, there's still racism, but ... these people are indeed Americans.'
Proving this point was one of the goals of much early Asian-American cinema, says John Woo of Asian Cinevision (ACV), the first arts organisation dedicated to exhibiting, promoting and preserving the work of media creators of Asian descent.