ABSTRACT
The independent Asian American media landscape has undergone significant changes in the past decade. With video capture and editing technologies becoming increasingly affordable and easy for novices to learn, the creation of short videos has become a commonplace pastime among the digital natives who make up today’s “YouTube generation.” While film festivals once served as the only vehicle for minority filmmakers to find an audience for their work, now social media platforms like YouTube let anyone publish videos for the world to see. This has helped filmmakers to share their videos quickly and gain large audiences with minimal investment in time or money. In this new media landscape, traditional film festivals can seem entirely irrelevant. This chapter, however, presents an alternative model of film festival organizing that negotiates this online–offline divide. Drawing on my experiences reviving an Asian American film festival in Seattle over the last five years, I illustrate how taking the best practices from traditional offline festivals and online video sharing through social channels can enable the production of an event that is not only relevant, but critical to serving the needs of local Asian Pacific American (APA) communities. In particular, I focus on bringing film festivals back to the activist roots that once drove the creation and distribution of independent media.
