In recent years, Asian-American cinema has enjoyed a mini-boom, with both dramatic films and documentaries by and about Asian-Americans earning big distribution deals and mountains of press. Groundbreaking narrative pieces such as Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow and Alice Wu’s Saving Face stand alongside Ramona Diaz’s celebrated documentary Imelda and Spencer Nakasako’s cross-cultural story, Refugee. Much of that notoriety is thanks in large part to NAATA, the National Asian American Telecommunications Association.

This year, NAATA celebrates its 25th anniversary as a cultural organization and promoter of over 1,000 Asian-American projects. Created in 1980 by Asian-American filmmakers and community activists from around the country, NAATA is one of the five Minority Consortia funded in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NAATA’s goal has always been to heighten the visibility of Asian-Americans in media by providing producing, funding and distribution opportunities for independent filmmakers.

After a quarter-century of accomplishments, the San Francisco-based organization continues to evolve. “We’re changing our name!” says executive director Eddie Wong. By the end of the year, NAATA will become the Center for Asian-American Media. “One reason is to make it simpler for people to understand who we are and what we do,” explains Wong. “We are a resource for Asian-American media. We distribute work, we present work on public television and we produce a film festival. We have a local imprint and we have a national imprint. It’s a matter of trying to put that all together into a recognizable brand.” Plus, the old name spurred confusion. “People would wonder, ‘What’s the Telecommunications part? Do you sell cell phones?’” Wong laughs.

Regardless of its name, Asian-American filmmakers have relied on NAATA for funding through its Media Fund and distribution through its relationship to PBS. NAATA also produces the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival, which provides a forum for screening everything from student to foreign films. Wong sees this process as NAATA’s most vital role. “We are privileged enough to give money to filmmakers, so that’s the beginning,” he maintains. “When they finish the work, we’ll present it on public television. Then, we’ll distribute it to schools and libraries; we follow the whole cycle of the film. So that’s one key part of making Asian-American film more prominent in US society.”

NAATA has also striven to tackle the juggernaut of traditional moviemaking:  Hollywood. “The other work that we do is more educational, on a mass scale,” Wong notes. “It’s advocating Asian-American stories and images to be in mass culture, to be part of commercial television and part of Hollywood.” As a member of the Asian Pacific Media Coalition, which also includes East-West Players, Media Action Network for Asian-Americans (MANAA), the National Asian Pacific Legal Consortium and others, NAATA fights for more jobs in the film industry for Asian-Americans.

To that end, NAATA also structures multiple community outreach screenings for corporate diversity programs, youth organizations and schools as a means to widen the audience for Asian-American films in ways public television or the festival can’t always reach. “We cold-call institutions to share programs with employee groups,” says Don Young, NAATA’s director of broadcast programming. Scheduled during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May, the employee referrals and corporate network screenings have spawned a consistent 30–40 national screenings of NAATA-produced work annually. “It’s a modest campaign, but dollar for dollar, it’s pretty effective,” Young says, describing how successful the audience attendance and interest has been. Wong adds, “The companies encourage it. It’s great for employee retention and for building camaraderie and identification with the company. It also can spread word-of-mouth for [subsequent public television] broadcasts.”

For Nakasako’s documentary Refugee, which chronicles a young man’s journey back to Cambodia and a father he has not seen in 25 years, NAATA always had a young audience in mind. “It did really well at the community level,” says Young. “We specifically wanted to reach young people and focus on areas where there’s a large Cambodian community, like Boston and San Francisco. It’s a tough piece to show on PBS, but it did get picked up on Independent Lens.” To date, Refugee has screened for over 30 youth groups across the nation.

Of course, where NAATA’s achievements have been most visible has been in public television. About half of NAATA-funded and produced work is shown on PBS, either via series such as P.O.V. and Independent Lens, or via satellite feeds to all public television stations. Young has observed that work produced by Asian-Americans has enjoyed more broadcast success in the last three to five years than in the past. “We’re submitting more work to be considered for public television, although I’ve noticed there are more particular kinds of work--personal journeys or diary films,” Young points out. “There’s still not enough historical work. But I have noticed more student work being broadcast. These aren’t just calling-card films; it’s work that’s made to be distributed.”

Simultaneously, there are more diverse filmmakers on the scene exploring topics that have never been broached. “Early projects were usually from Chinese or East Asian filmmakers,” says Young. “But now, there’s a complexity of Asian groups in the last years.” Recent NAATA-supported films that have done well on P.O.V., include Richard Hall and Fahm Fong Saeyang’s Death of a Shaman, Fong Saeyang’s story of her father’s descent from “respectability to hopelessness” and her Mien family’s consequent struggles to make a life in the United States. Another NAATA-funded documentary, Daughters of Everest (Sapana Sakya, Ramyata Limbu, dirs./prods.), about the first climbing expedition by five Nepalese women of Mount Everest, aired nationally on PBS after winning the Best Film on Climbing prize at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.

NAATA is also supporting and screening films from Middle Eastern filmmakers. “After 9/11, we took a really hard look at whether we should actually accept proposals about Arab-Americans, and we do,” says Wong. “Traditionally, we’ve funded Asian-Americans, East Asians, South Asians, but I guess if you really had to stretch it, the ‘Middle East’ is part of Asia. We have no problem funding those stories that really need to be told.”

NAATA’s other major distribution arm is as producer of the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival, now in its 23rd year. Since 2000, festival attendance has increased by a record 50 percent, to over 25,000 people. “It’s always been part of NAATA’s mission to make sure that people understood our experiences broadly,” says Wong. “That’s why Jim Yee [NAATA’s first executive director, who went on to become the executive director of ITVS before he lost his bout with cancer in 2001] really wanted to start a film festival. He felt that Asian-American filmmakers needed to be legitimized in the eyes of film critics, audiences, etc. And over the years, NAATA and its board have been willing to go through the anxiety of putting on a film festival.”

Despite the financial risks, NAATA’s festival has expanded to Berkeley and San Jose, has grown to 11 days and has instituted an awards segment. According to Festival Director Chi-Hui Yang, “There’s now a higher profile for Asian-American cinema.  We’re noticing a lot more crossover films such as Better Luck Tomorrow, Saving Face and Robot Stories, where the percentage of non-Asian-Americans in attendance is higher.  It’s not just about Asian-American cinema. It’s just good cinema.” The biggest challenge in the festival’s future, but one worth countless opportunities, would be to develop a market arm of the festival for distributors and sales representatives. “We’ve built audience and industry interest,” says Yang. “Unfortunately, very few Asian-American films are released commercially. We have the films, we have the infrastructure to do it, now we’re looking at the interest of the distributors.”

As NAATA moves forward as the Center for Asian-American Media, its future developments and expansions will be inextricably tied to those of PBS. The topic of funding is never far from the surface. The five Minority Consortia receive a total of $5 million from CPB. As more filmmakers apply for NAATA’s annual Media Fund, the less funding there is to spread around. “We get anywhere from 70 to 100 proposals a year and of that maybe we’re able to fund at the most, 10 or 15,” says Wong. In addition, the amount of CPB funding has remained the same for the past 15 years.

“The fundamental question is, How do we develop enough financial support from our own community in order to exist if we lose federal funding?” says Wong. “Are there enough people who are willing to give money to ensure the future of this kind of cinematic expression?”

One curious hurdle is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May. “Heritage Month is both a curse and a blessing,” says Young. “Some stations support it, some are tired of it. We’d like to tailor more work for different stations.” Wong continues, “It’s like trying to convince [the stations] that not every Asian-American program needs to be shown in May; it can be shown in other parts of the year and do really well.”

Another hope for the future lies in the digital divide: The current analog signals of broadcasting will be phased out and replaced by digital formats, which will enable more channel capacity available for public television stations. The conversion was slotted for 2006; with any luck Congress and the FCC will complete the digital conversion by 2008. “Theoretically, each station would have three or four additional channels,” Wong notes. “We have more content than the stations can absorb at this point.” With the digital conversion of public television, there’s been interest in creating a minority channel. “We could program strands of our own,” he adds.

Even with the work that NAATA has accomplished to make Asian-American films and filmmakers more visible in the public arena, there’s a lot more ground to cover. NAATA’s challenges are similar to those of public television in general: how to increase the audience base and how to set up various modes of funding. “I’d love to see more work get distributed commercially,” Wong maintains. “We see so many excellent films come to our festival that don’t get wide distribution. We’d like to explore distribution via video-on-demand. The audience is there; we just need to reach them.”

Lily Ng is currently producing 4th and Goal, a documentary that follows five junior college football players as they try to go pro. She is also in development on a series for cable television.