CAAMFest 2024: LIFTING THE TRUTHS OF OUR STORIES

These are stories that are brave, bizarre, beautiful, and are all true of something – they are ours.Generous expressions of what impacts us, what matters, what we long for and imagine. It is of US. It is anthropic. We are faceted in our existence.

In a year like this one, we need stories to do more than ever. Here, in the ritual of CAAMFest, we are privileged to tell our truths. In these stories we are emboldened to record how we see the world and ourselves in it. By giving ourselves permission to do so, we are responding to being overlooked, misunderstood, unknown. We are building capacities to truly see each other and to feel deeply side by side. It is the most powerful thing in movement building, our shared humanity. Amid misinformation and deep fakes, we are craving genuine perspective, and sides of ourselves that we are not afraid to share.

CAAMFest 2024 honors these storytellers of our time. To tell what is true to you is brave. We see you in your wonder, urgency, tenderness, joy, grief, determination, anger and stand with you. This CAAMFest is a call to lifting the truths of our stories.

CAAM presents CAAMFest (formerly the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival) in May, the world’s largest showcase for new Asian American and Asian film, food and music programs, annually presenting over 100 works in San Francisco and Oakland. Since 1982, our film festival has been an important launching point for Asian American independent filmmakers as well as a vital source for new Asian cinema.