ABSTRACT
In 1980, a small group of Asian American media activists convened on the campus of University of California, Berkeley and created the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA), currently known as the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM). Since its inception, CAAM’s influence regarding independent Asian American media is arguably unparalleled. Its annual film festival, started in 1982, helped launch the careers of filmmakers like Wayne Wang, Justin Lin, and Jennifer Phang. CAAM’s partnership with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) provided selected documentaries with inroads to distribution and exhibition with mainstream audiences. In addition, CAAM’s institutional relationship with PBS’s funding and programming system shaped Asian American self-representation by cultivating a vibrant yet limited documentary film culture (Okada 2005, 2015). And as part of the National Minority Consortia, which is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CAAM and other minority groups help diversify public television, as a whole, with minority (self-)representations and stories. Their distribution arm helped bring Asian American documentaries into college and community center classrooms across the nation.
