“The first Asian American film from a major Hollywood studio in 25 years.” That was the mantle carried by “Crazy Rich Asians” when it arrived in 2018. But surely, observers asked, there had to have been Asian American films since “The Joy Luck Club” even if Hollywood didn’t deliver them? The same tentative excitement surrounded Netflix’s “Always Be My Maybe” this year: If this wasn’t the first Asian American rom-com, then what was?

Clearly, it’s time for a canon, a set of films that fans can debate, but which make undeniable that Asian American cinema exists and elicit some consensus about their quality and cultural impact.

True, Asian American cinema has long had a testy relationship with canons. In fact, early films, like those made by Visual Communications in the 1970s, existed to undermine the notion of canons altogether, agitating from the margins against a mainstream that could never understand or assimilate its cultures or politics. In later decades, Asian American film and video explicitly explored image-making too experimental, too queer, too resistant to labels to comfortably assemble into a neat corpus.

However, following the so-called “Class of 1997” when an unprecedented number of feature films premiered at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (including Rea Tajiri’s “Strawberry Fields” and Quentin Lee and Justin Lin’s “Shopping for Fangs”), a wave of self-consciously Asian American films with an eye on national audiences burst onto the scene. Panels and funding opportunities organized by Visual Communications in Los Angeles, Asian CineVision in New York and the National Asian American Telecommunications Assn. in San Francisco provided institutional support for feature films.



Meanwhile, Asian American film festivals in Chicago, San Diego, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Austin and elsewhere emerged to promote and exhibit these new works. Whereas an earlier generation of sporadic feature filmmaking (Wayne Wang’s “Chan Is Missing” in 1982, Mira Nair’s “Mississippi Masala” in 1991, Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” in 1993) found audiences primarily in the mainstream art house circuit, this later wave of films fed a nationwide hunger of Asian Americans to see themselves reflected onscreen and on their own terms. This national festival circuit became an informal distribution network and bestowed the films awards.

We invited over more than 20 Asian American critics and curators who professionally observed and debated the scene for the last two decades to participate.

The titles that fed this growing movement suggest the possibility of a canon that can coexist with Asian American cinema’s more anticanon impulses, which continue to this day.

To determine that canon, we invited more than 20 Asian American critics and curators who professionally observed and debated the scene for the last two decades to participate in a poll. They were limited to films from this period (2000-2019) directed by and prominently featuring Asian Americans. (Canada was bracketed off because while Asian Canadian cinema played the same festival circuit, its films were produced in a different political context surrounding issues of immigration, citizenship and national belonging all central to how Asian American cinema was first defined.)

The resulting list won’t be surprising to longtime fans, but it will be a marvel to the uninitiated. Topping the poll is Justin Lin’s electrifying breakout “Better Luck Tomorrow.” Recent films with Sundance Film Festival pedigrees crowd the rest of the top 10. But after that are lesser-known titles — comedies, family dramas, documentaries — craving rediscovery: films like Spencer Nakasako’s powerful “Refugee” about Cambodian families on two continents, and Grace Lee’s “The Grace Lee Project,” about a Missouri director’s nationwide search to find Asian American women with her same name.

While the top 20 only includes one Southeast Asian director (Ham Tran) and two South Asian directors (Mira Nair and Aneesh Chaganty), the rest of the list reveals broader ethnic diversity, suggesting that even within Asian American cinema are voices still demanding recognition.


If anything, canons should beget other canons, expanding the corpus and making it ever more impossible to deny the vast existence of Asian American filmmaking, or the suggestion that it’s ever needed Hollywood to tell its own stories.

Hu is the artistic director of the Pacific Arts Movement, presenters of the San Diego Asian Film Festival.