The Vancouver Asian Film Festival will celebrate its 30th anniversary from Nov. 5 to 15 by programming Shopping for Fangs, the inaugural festival’s opening film.
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The Vancouver Asian Film Festival (VAFF) is marking its 30th anniversary with Shopping for Fangs returning to open the festival, which runs Nov. 5 to 15.
The dark indie comedy originally opened the inaugural VAFF three decades ago. It was co-directed by Quentin Lee and Justin Lin, and the film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 1997 before heading to VAFF.
Shopping for Fangs will be screened as an opening-night selection on Nov. 5, beginning an 11-day programme featuring Asian Canadian and global Asian diaspora cinema. The lineup includes more than 100 films presented through Vancouver theatre screenings and virtual programming across Canada, with more than 50 Canadian titles, 40 international films, 18 animated works and 78 premieres.
Lee said he missed the original VAFF presentation because he and Lin were travelling, and that the screening will “complete an unfinished chapter” for him. “I'm very excited because I felt like, now, I could finally attend the screening and actually have a renewed look at the film,” Lee said. “It's really like a full circle coming back, and I feel like a homecoming queen or king. If Justin comes, then he can be the king, I'll be the queen.”
Shopping for Fangs follows several Asian American characters in Los Angeles as their intersecting identity crises take on strange, transformative forms, including a man who believes he may be turning into a werewolf, a married woman who receives seductive phone calls, and a young gay photographer who spends time observing in a local coffee shop.
Lee said the film’s themes were meant to differ from the kinds of stories about Asian North American life that were landing on mainstream screens at the time. He added that with limited gay Asian content then, he wanted queer characters to be part of the ensemble rather than “lingering out on the margins,” describing how “The lesbianism and the homosexuality become sort of a metaphor for self-love.”
VAFF founder Barbara Lee said the decision to programme Shopping for Fangs was rooted in the film’s boldness at the time. “You had to be bold back then to make any kind of breakthrough through the clutter,” she said. “It was unapologetically Asian and unapologetically different.”
Lee credited the festival’s growth to its commitment to creating a platform for emerging filmmakers. She said VAFF began after she took her own short film to the Seattle Asian American International Film Festival because Vancouver had no equivalent, and that seeing her represented on a big screen in a contemporary story helped spur her to found “Canada's first and longest-running Asian film festival.”
According to the festival information, VAFF launched Elimin8Hate in 2020 as an anti-Asian racism platform, and its Mighty Asian Moviemaking Marathon has supported emerging filmmakers in creating calling-card shorts and building their filmographies.
In addition to the opening film, the 30th festival includes special presentations such as the Western Canadian premiere of Thomas Percy Kim’s Isle Child and the Canadian premiere of Jun Robles Lana’s Sisa, described as taking place in the Philippines during the Philippine–American War. The festival also continues its local programming for independent Asian Canadian filmmakers through WestCoast Tales.
Barbara Lee also has a feature in this year’s festival, an 88-minute film titled Sing My Song, which she described as “kind of full circle.” “It feels good,” she said.
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