A Wry ‘America’

The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film & Video Festival, stronger than ever in its 12th year, opens tonight at 7:30 at the Directors Guild with Renee Tajima-Pen~a’s delightfully wry “My America . . . Or Honk If You Love Buddha.” In it, this notable documentarian attempts to answer the question, “Will we truly ever belong in America?”

The answer is yes, but not before Tajima-Pen~a delves deeply into her own family history as the Chicago-born daughter of Japanese Americans she considered carbons of Ozzie and Harriet and into the lives of various others, most notably, well-known character actor Victor Wong. If most nisei are like Tajima-Pen~a’s parents, big on seeming all-American, their children--the sansei (third-generation Americans)--have wanted to reclaim a sense of Japanese cultural heritage while coming to terms with the legacy of the World War II internment, Tajima-Pen~a seems to be saying.

What a complicated life Wong, 70ish, has led, first as the rebellious son of the traditionalist mayor of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Wong apparently was one of the very few Chinese Americans who ventured a block or so out of his turf to become so caught up with the beats in adjacent North Beach. “They were the first who treated me like one of the boys,” Wong said. He ended up being memorialized in Jack Kerouac’s “The Big Sur.”

Wong has had five children by four wives, none of them Chinese American, to arrive at the kind of self-knowledge that allows him to see his father in himself. And by the time Tajima-Pen~a has taken us through her memorable “visual scrapbook,” ending with her own marriage (to a Mexican American), she concludes that she can only hope to be as successful in her life as her parents have been. With much wit and good humor, a lot of it directed to herself, Tajima-Pen~a raises the serious questions of how an individual of Asian descent goes about establishing a sense of identity in our society.

Presented by Visual Communications, the Asian Pacific American media organization, the festival moves Friday to the Music Hall Theater in Beverly Hills, where it continues through May 22. Among the many films screening over the weekend are two knockout features, both of which richly deserve to break out into regular runs. Indeed, the experience of watching Chris Chan Lee’s “Yellow” (Friday at 9 p.m.) is akin to seeing “American Graffiti” for the first time--you’re even tempted to sum it up as “Korean American Graffiti.”

On the night before his high school graduation, Sin Lee (Michael Daeho Chung), the dutiful son of a severe, hot-tempered Los Angeles grocery store proprietor (Soon-Teck Oh, never better), has told his friends that some black youths held up the store for $1,500. The thrust of the film involves Sin’s friends’ attempts to raise enough money to cover the loss so that Sin will escape the certain wrath of his father, who will surely delay his son’s entrance to college, making him earn back the money piecemeal.

Lee has really got something going here, filling the screen with exceedingly well-drawn and likable young people with whom we can easily identify. Meanwhile, we peer into the painful chasm that can separate immigrant parents and their children, who are caught up in American popular culture.

While “Yellow” packs a terrific punch, Michael Idemoto and Eric Nakamura’s “Sunsets” (Saturday at 9 p.m.) is more low-key. Shot in black-and-white, it has an assured, sophisticated style as the filmmakers zero in on three pals during their last summer together in Watsonville, the old agricultural community just below Monterey.

Josh Brand’s Gary, fresh out of jail, is reckless, angry, alienated from his family and clearly headed for big trouble unless level-headed Mark (Idemoto), who’s all set to go to college, and the passive, paunchy Dave (Nicholas Constant) are able get their friend to change direction. Or will they become caught up in his self-destructiveness? For a film with such an easy flow and lack of pretense, “Sunsets” is actually reflective and tough-minded.

For all their seriousness, “Yellow” and “Sunsets” have lots of humor.

Among the many shorts screening throughout the festival is Jessica Yu’s eight-minute “Better Late” (screening Sunday as the last of six shorts in a 2:30 p.m. program), an amusing vignette with a surprise twist in which a 60-something man (Rod Roeser) rehearses a proposal of marriage. Information: (213) 680-4462.

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Filmforum will present at 7 p.m. at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., on Saturday Beth B’s “Visiting Desire” and on Sunday Chantal Akerman’s “D’Est” (“From the East”); the filmmakers will be present.

Beth B has long been a key presence in New York’s alternative cinema, and her “Visiting Desire” is a clever and revealing, amusing and serious experiment in which a group of people are invited to act out their fantasies with a stranger who is sitting on a bed alone.

The strangers, whom Beth B calls “Sitters,” are Lydia Lunch, Chloe Dzubilo, Ned Ambler and Cyrus Khambatta, all of them performing artists except for Ambler, a casting director turned film director. The visitors are also by and large in the arts and the media, with the result that you’ve got a screen full of New York professionals and “scenesters” who are pretty self-possessed.

What Beth B does is to allow two people to discover an often unexpected intimacy--it may only be a conversation--between themselves. (Of course, the two individuals don’t always click.) Occasionally, too, the sitter will get into the fantasy even more than the visitor. “Visiting Desire” is sometimes funny, sometimes erotic, but it is not a sex film. It suggests the importance of people being open to their imaginations.

“D’Est,” which was shown at the 1994 AFI Filmfest, is a demanding but luminously beautiful film from Belgium’s ever-venturesome Chantal Akerman, who literally--and slowly--pans her camera on a train trip from the former East Germany to Moscow in an attempt to record public life (with several glimpses of private lives interspersed) before change inevitably occurs. Her journey spans summer to winter, ending in a long survey of Moscow, where most citizens seem frozen in endless queues. As always, Akerman’s sense of composition, camera placement and movement is eloquent. “D’Est” quietly celebrates the continuity of life beyond political systems.