You mean my exact address?

What am I, a stalker? No. Give me a vicinity, an area.

I live in Sorrento Valley.

You are married with how many kids?

Two. A three and a four year old. The three-year-old is adopted from Korea and the four-year-old came out of my belly.

I had not heard that you adopted a baby. Good for you.

Yeah. Thank you.

You were our favorite news diva at Channel 10. Why did you decide to deprive San Diego television viewers of your elan and perspicacity?

It really wasn’t…I don’t know. The timing was right. In local news the business model is suffering and a lot of the old school people who are still left and making more than six figures are at risk. Carol Lebeau left. I was part time at the time I decided to leave. They wanted me to go back full time. I was working two days a week and they wanted me to go back to work five days a week. They wanted to take away my anchoring. They wanted me to be a one man band reporter carrying my own camera, but they didn’t want to pay me more than the two days they were already paying me. I don’t think so. They should have just fired me or let me go, because this is really offensive. That’s just the model in which they are working now. But you know, the film festival is my newscast so I feel like I’m doing the exact same thing I was doing over there.

Yes, but it’s only two weeks out of the year.

No. We do it all year long.

But we don’t get to see you with any regularity.

That’s fine. I regularly get to see our members. It’s so interesting because everything that I have learned from news has easily transferred over to what I am doing for the Film Foundation.

You got the idea for the film festival 10 years ago. Where did it come from?

It came from the time I was president of the Asian American Journalists Association. It was really boring and I thought we have all these meetings with 20 or 30 journalists, let’s do something bigger and better. Let’s engage the larger community in issues that people care about outside of journalism. A film festival sounded like a good idea. As you know, I am not a cinephile. I didn’t grow up watching a million movies.

Poor thing.

I come from an immigrant family and movies were not valued in my family. “E.T.” was the first movie I watched in a movie theater.

I repeat: Poor thing.

(Laughing) While I love movies, I am not a cinephile and I didn’t study film. The fact that I am running a film festival is very interesting. I felt there was a need in this community to connect them to these films that a lot of people don’t know how to get access to. A lot of these films represent stories that need to be seen by a mass audience. Those are the two main reasons why I’m doing what I do.

How has the festival changed in 10 years?

It’s kind of like going to high school. When you’re a freshman you don’t have that many friends and it’s kind of awkward.

I wouldn’t know.

(Laughing) And every single year you get more friends, start maturing and start developing your style. By the time you’re a senior, it’s like you own the halls. We are now in our super senior year. We have collected a number of loyal patrons and members that love and respect us and don’t want to see us go away. That’s what’s happened over the past 10 years. Our programming staff has really matured. I have matured in the way that I view films. I’m still not a cinephile, but I know what works well in San Diego and with our audience. We have grown to the point we have a lot of staffers who can do a lot great things. I always cross my “t’s” and dot my “i’s” so we have extreme attention to detail especially for our filmmakers.

This is the first year where the festival will run for two weeks instead of one.

Yeah. (Laughing) And I hope the only year.

Why?

Don’t you think it’s crazy that we are doing it in a year when we are in the worst recession in US history?

Not really. People always want entertainment and in times like this even more so.

You’re right, but you have to think from a non-profit standpoint. We got one film that was shipped to us from Korea. What idiots. We ask that they don’t ship it priority and they still ship it fricking priority.

How much?

$500.00!

And that’s just a one-way ticket.

Yeah. We have 200 films coming to us. Also, when you do double it’s exponential. I have a contracted staff, but they all have full-time jobs. Doing two weeks just puts a huge burden on everybody and on top of that it’s expensive. We decided to do it because initially we wanted to do ten days for our tenth anniversary. The way that the (theater) rental works, you have to rent by the week. Even if we did ten days there would be four or five days that are dark that we paid for. Screw it! We did the two weeks.

What do we have to look forward to in the 10th Anniversary years that’s different than festivals past?

We definitely package the films better for people. For the first time we have a Asian Extreme series featuring “fringe” cinema from Japan. We have a series of films from emerging filmmakers in Taiwan. We have a North Korean series. I had the foresight, even before the Una Lee and Lora Ling thing…I just found out that people do not know what is happening in North Korea. Just by chance, there were three great films that came out in the last year about the North Korean experience.  We packaged that with a free panel discussion. There are an extraordinary number of films that are different and challenging and new. We have a Japanese anime from Russia. You won’t see that anywhere else.

That’s true.

This year, taking the economy into consideration, we are offering free films every day at 4 pm throughout the festival. These aren’t just ho-hum silly movies. We want people to say, “Hot damn! I can’t believe that was free. I’m going to go see another film now.” A lot of them are documentaries with filmmakers who are coming for Q&A’s. Our strategy this year is on a scale of 1 to 5, how meaningful was this program to you? And there are some films in here from Iran and Iraq that will cause people to ask why they are included in this festival. They feel that they have no Asian content, but we are also educating the community to just how vast the Asian continent is. This is what drives our programming. How meaningful is this film for the community.

Speaking of programming, how does SDAFF go about selecting the 200 films that you will be showing this year?

Our eight programmers watched about six hundred movies. Collectively, each film has been watched by at least three people. We have an on-line grid that will show that it’s been watched, who watched it and what the score was. The only exceptions are really big films from Cannes or Berlin that were recruited by our new programmer Anderson Le. He’s the head programmer of the Hawaii International Film Festival. He selects a handful of the Asian international films we are showing sight unseen. We judge films on technique, writing, acting and viewing experience. Above all the big question is should this film be in our festival. There are certain films that might do well in New York or Paris that won’t work in San Diego without the benefit of a discussion or the filmmaker being present. Every other week or so we have what we call “Come to Jesus” meetings where we literally argue the merits of certain films.

Once you have selected the movies, what is it like programming a two week festival?

We know that every specific film has an audience. You learn certain rules by which to play. You can’t show an Indian movie on Sundays because Indians go to the temple. Or we can’t show a Korean film on Sunday afternoon because they all go to church. Vietnamese films are perfect on Sunday because they work six days a week. Take that into consideration and every single slot has also been argued over and talked about. That’s pretty much our general programming process. It’s arduous.

I know that I’ve raked you over the coals concerning your showing the “international cut” of John Woo’s “Red Cliff.”

I know, I know.

The last thing I said to him during our interview was “Master Woo,” and I called him “Master Woo” and I meant it…

Oh, God!

I said, “you’re John Woo. get us the two-part version. You can do it.” He said that he was doing his best, so it still may not be out of the question. I don’t know how that will fit into your schedule…

It won’t. We’ll have to do it as a special event. I think that the distributors feel that showing the uncut version would not help to promote the “international cut.” If people can see the uncut version why would they go and see the “international cut?” The reason that we are showing this film is because Magnolia Pictures wants to create a buzz when it is released in theaters. I see where there strategy comes from. It’s a business and the bottom line is this: It’s been some time since John Woo has had a big hit. We want to help support him as a filmmaker and if this is the way to go, so be it.

I just know that after watching the 5 hour cut, key scenes will be missing. They did it to him with “Windtalkers,” too. I am a purist and a child who doesn’t like having things taken away from him.

I know, but not everyone is like you Scott.

Never heard that before.

I find that people today want everything right away quick. They want to get to the story and figure it out right away. You can blame reality television for that.

Do you have any big guests this year that you want to talk up?

We don’t have a lot of big guests. We have a lot of people who are emerging or up and coming. John Cho (”Harold and Kumar,” “Star Trek”) would probably be the biggest one.

He’s not emerging, he’s emerged!

He’s on this new ABC series and he had a five-page fashion spread in GQ Magazine. It wasn’t even editorial. It was pure fashion. We tried very hard to get some of these actors to come for the bigger pictures. Name any of the smaller indie films and the actors and directors are coming. I have always found that with our community…we had George Takei and did an “Inside the Actor’s Studio” style interview. I think at any other festival there would have been a line around the door. We barely had 75 people attend. We know that at our festival, actors are icing on the cake. People attend SDAFF for the content.

For a complete listing of movies and showtimes, click here.

3 Responses to “EC talks with Lee Ann Kim, founder and director of the San Diego Asian Film Festival”

1. John Dacapias on October 12th, 2009 10:48 am

   YEAH, great interview!

   Now, to put in another plug, make sure each and everyone reading this interview and these very words, to make it to this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

   *lowers voice

   Not just ’cause I volunteer for them and love them dearly!

2. Rob on October 13th, 2009 5:22 am

   If only Fort Wayne had such diversity…

   Note: There’s no dates listed anywhere for the SDAFF - or did I miss it?

3. Rob on October 13th, 2009 7:40 am

   I was distracted by Ms. Kim’s lovely portrait and didn’t see “click here”. Can you blame me?

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