The Asian American films to discover before streaming platforms pick them up
San Diego Asian Film Festival opens November 5 with 190-plus films. Five Asian American Panorama titles with showtimes before wider distribution catches up.
The Goldscene Desk
The 27th San Diego Asian Film Festival opens Thursday, November 5, with more than 190 films from over 30 countries. Pacific Arts Movement runs it through November 14 across Balboa Park, Mission Valley, and UTC. Opening night is In Waves, Phuong Mai Nguyen's animated skate-and-surf meet-cute with Stephanie Hsu and Will Sharpe, at the San Diego Natural History Museum at 7:00 p.m.
Asian American Panorama is the section built for diaspora features and docs that still need a room. The slate runs from near-future Los Angeles hustles to caregiving dramas, mutual-aid archives, and political docs. General admission is $15 ($12 for Pac Arts members). Opening and closing nights are $40. Schedule and tickets live on sdaff.org.
These five Panorama titles are the ones to follow while they are still festival prints.
1. Tycoon
Charlotte Zhang's debut follows two young grifters through Los Angeles on the cusp of the 2028 Olympics, after a livestock collapse leaves GMO cockroaches as protein and ICE pressure hangs over the neighborhoods. Miguel Padilla-Juarez and Jon Lawrence Reyes carry the hustle. Zhang shoots on a mix of MiniDV, phone, and Super 8, with street takeovers and car interiors doing as much work as plot. MoMA Doc Fortnight and Rotterdam already took it. At UltraStar you still get the handmade grain before a platform compresses it.
When: Sunday, November 8, 2:45 p.m., UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley.
2. Zi
Kogonada made Columbus and After Yang, then worked at a bigger Hollywood scale. Zi pulls him back to a skeleton crew and a Hong Kong night. Michelle Mao plays a young woman waiting on neurology results and seeing versions of her future self. Haley Lu Richardson and Jin Ha circle the frame. The film was shot fast in the streets, with Cantonese, Mandarin, and English in the mix. Sundance and Busan already programmed it. The sci-fi stays small and temporal, closer to a city poem than a franchise engine.
When: Wednesday, November 11, 5:45 p.m., UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley.
3. Take Me Home
Liz Sargent expands her 2023 Sundance short into a feature about Anna, a middle-aged Korean adoptee with a cognitive disability who shares care with her aging white parents in Florida. Anna Sargent, the director's sister, plays Anna. Ali Ahn is the sister calling from across the country. Victor Slezak and Marceline Hugot play the parents as the household balance breaks under heat and dementia. Sundance gave it the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Association of Korean Adoptees San Diego is co-presenting, and Sargent is scheduled for a Q&A. The awards circuit will chase the file later. This week you get the reception and the questions.
When: Sunday, November 8, 12:45 p.m., UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley.
4. The Auntie Sewing Squad Resistance Playbook
Valerie Soe's documentary follows performance artist Kristina Wong's Auntie Sewing Squad, the mostly BIPOC sewists who turned living rooms into mask shops when federal PPE failed. The group grew past 800 volunteers, shipped masks to farmworkers, asylum seekers, protesters, and others the supply chain forgot, then dissolved when the emergency changed. Soe was inside the Facebook group and the Zoom rooms, and she frames mutual aid as a method other organizers can reuse. CAAM and LAAPFF already played it. At 72 minutes, it leaves room to talk afterward.
When: Sunday, November 8, 12:25 p.m., UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley. It overlaps Take Me Home by about twenty minutes, so choose one Sunday midday seat.
5. TikTok Never Dies
Hao Wu, who brought 76 Days to SDAFF in 2020, follows three U.S. creators, Steven King, Chloe Joy Sexton, and Topher Townsend, through the ban fight that reached the Supreme Court. The West Coast premiere lands here after Tribeca. Wu keeps the vertical app inside a horizontal film and tracks the strange allyships that formed when the platform became a ballot issue. The news cycle already covered the policy twists. This cut stays with the three faces who lived them.
When: Wednesday, November 11, 7:50 p.m., UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley. Zi ends around 7:24 if it starts on time, so a same-night stack is possible if you leave as credits roll.
Buy through the festival schedule, arrive early at UltraStar, and use opening night for the crowd. Use these five for the titles that still reward a ticket.
