When Alice Wu wrote and directed her 2005 debut, “Saving Face,” she knew it wasn’t going to be your typical Hollywood rom-com. Other than the “Last Emperor” star Joan Chen, cast wildly against type as a frumpy (until she isn’t), mysteriously pregnant mom, the ensemble consisted largely of unknowns. Much of the film was set in Flushing, Queens, and not even the neighborhood’s prettiest parts; and the story itself focused on a budding lesbian relationship between two Chinese-American overachievers.

“I was trying to make the biggest romantic comedy I could on a tiny budget, with all Asian-American actors, and half of it in Mandarin Chinese,” she said.

Even so, “Saving Face,” years away from the successes of either “The Joy Luck Club,” in 1993, or 2018’s “Crazy Rich Asians,” has had an outsized impact on Asian-American filmmakers and cinema. Ali Wong (“Always Be My Maybe”) has said that seeing it as a young girl made her believe that “Asian-Americans were capable of creating great art.” Last year, it was named one of the 20 best Asian-American films of the last 20 years by a collection of critics and curators assembled by The Los Angeles Times.

Stephen Gong, executive director of San Francisco’s Center for Asian American Media (host of the film festival CAAMFest), went one better, placing it in his Top 10 of all time, alongside Wayne Wang’s 1982 indie “Chan Is Missing” and Justin Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow.”