NAATA at 25

By Renee Tajima-Peña

When asked to write an essay recalling the old days, I phoned Spencer Nakasako because he still has a memory. I lost a lot of those brain cells as a student in the 70s, and maybe I became a documentary filmmaker because that's the only way I could remember people and events. Indeed dead brain cells, wild times and youthful rebellion were all essential components of the early evolution of APA cinema and of NAATA's formation in 1980. As Spencer noted—the one thing I do clearly remember—"We didn't know anything, and we didn't care that we didn't know anything." If you wanted to make a film, you did it. Don't know how? No problem—why be bound by the retrograde conventions of a racist cinema anyway? Don't have a camera? Someone knows the equipment guy at the film school. Distribution? When no one wanted to show our work, we invented our own venues. Such was the attitude that made the atmosphere in 1980 so heady and full of possibility, and gave NAATA life.

Everyone had a story of how they came to the scene, whether inspired by anger or yearning, the Third Cinema or the avant-garde. APA independent filmmaking at its beginnings was an essentially political act. Youthful rebellion may have energized the genre, but its core principles of social justice and self-determination came out of a protracted and organized movement of artists, activists and scholars to serve our communities. It was fitting that NAATA's first Executive Director was a former tenant organizer and Chinatown schools activist, Jim Yee.

Over these 25 years, APA media has not changed as much as it has evolved. Back in the day, we would actually travel across country to map out a political strategy and dream of what APA media could become. We were a cohesive, but tiny universe. Today the field has grown exponentially; we exist as our own satellites, moving in and out of each other's orbits at NAATA festivals or wherever filmmakers gather, virtual or otherwise. However, the essential character of APA filmmaking still holds true to a remarkable degree. Witness the digital slam organized by Visual Communications as a posthumous tribute to its Executive Director, Linda Mabalot (to be screened as part of the VISUAL COMMUNICATIONS AT 35 program at this year's festival). Linda is one of the pantheon of late media pioneers—Jim, Jan Sakamoto, Steve Ning, and Steve Tatsukawa—each one a death too young, an almost incomprehensible loss. No doubt they would have all been pleased with their legacy on view at the slam, a virtual electronic meteor shower of 30-second tapes produced by dozens of filmmakers. The slammers varied in ethnicity, age and genre, embracing experimental, narrative, documentary, and a lot of humor. Many have been nurtured and supported by NAATA, which has always been committed to a big tent ideal. Rather than dictate a fixed ideological or aesthetic trajectory of how films should be made, it set the stage for these works to be made at all.

And so the APA independent scene still manages to surprise and electrify. I felt the same air of possibility watching BETTER LUCK TOMORROW as I did back in 1981, when I went to a screening of a low-budget movie called CHAN IS MISSING by a then-unknown filmmaker named Wayne Wang. With many new filmmakers, the APA experience is not a conscious strategy but an implicit one, filtering organically through individual, filmic sensibilities. It is a generation of slammers, more self-assured and at home in center stage. As Spencer put it, "Maybe the difference between the old days and now is that unlike us, these new-schoolers actually know what they're doing."