I hadn’t done a #throwback in such a long time, but seeing how dropping bombs is a recurring theme today, I thought I’d drop a bomb of my own: back in early 2001, filmmaker Justin Lin and Linda Mabalot, our former Executive Director at Visual Communications, struck a modest deal to let VC serve as HQ for the independent feature he was working to get made. 

Erika Vazquez, one of our Communications Associates for the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, has a chat with Operations Manager Alvin Nuval. We are still looking for people to join our Festival team as a volunteer, so sign up here!

Learn about Little Tokyo's rich history and intersection of people of color within Los Angeles in this feature article by Maya Santos and Joel Quizon from Form Follows Function. "Bronzeville, Little Tokyo" is a free program during the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival that will run from April 29-30.

In December 2016, we were pleased to receive news from our friends at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences that the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival has been approved as an Academy Award®-qualifying festival for Short Film Awards. Recipient(s) of the Film Festival’s Golden Reel Award for Narrative Short Film will be eligible for consideration in the Animated Short Film/Live-Action Short Film category of the Academy Awards®. Check out the list of films here.

In the six years since she brought director Leena Pendharkar’s RASPBERRY MAGIC to the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, producer Megha Kadakia has seemingly been a constant fixture at subsequent Festival Week editions. Consider last year, 2015: in addition to serving as Executive Producer for Ravi Kapoor’s MISS INDIA AMERICA (a double-award winner at the Film Festival), she also re-teamed with director Pendharkar for DANDEKAR MAKES A SANDWICH, a droll day-in-the-life short that is being expanded into a full-length feature. Not too shabby for a former UCLA bio-chemistry major whose career shifts into arts management (she served for a time as the Marketing and Communications manager for Artwallah and other multi-cultural arts festivals) have resulted in a rising career as a producer of short and feature-length motion pictures.