The goons of the Orange Dementia Patient’s administration may refuse to acknowledge the contributions of non-white cultures all it wants. For the rest of us, May is Asian Pacific Heritage Month, which means it’s time for this year’s CAAMFest.

The 44th CAAMFest runs from May 7-10, 2026. Its programming will be clustered around several spots in Japantown (the AMC Kabuki and New People Cinema) and in the Civic Center area (Koret Auditorium). Aside from film industry panels, there will be films screening on subjects ranging from the immigrant experience to the current American political climate.

As with any film festival, choosing films to watch may seem like an overwhelming task.  To help the curious reader get started, here are 10 reasons to dive into the offerings in this year’s festival:

Contrary to what the Orange Tyrant’s administration and his media lickspittles would have the American population believe, ICE Gestapo prisons such as Alligator Alcatraz are unfortunately not a new phenomenon.  The notorious Japanese-American internment camps of World War II were also places where non-white Americans were subjected to inhumane treatment by American government authorities. 

Emiko Omori has made several films about the effects of World War II internment on the Japanese-American community.  Her newest film, “Defiant To The Last: Resistance At The Tule Lake Jail,” examines a forgotten lay-down strike by Japanese-American prisoners facing eventual deportation.  It shows how resistance is still possible even when a person has been completely stripped of the accoutrements of their pre-prison life.  But the film also asks what meaning remains in American citizenship when that country’s government has deliberately abused and persecuted the possessor of that citizenship.

What does the famed ballet “The Nutcracker” and the Confederate battle flag have in common?  Both have supporters who claim the retrograde racial attitudes they incorporate constitute history.  In the case of “The Nutcracker” and other well-known ballets, racist Asian caricatures are accepted by traditionalists as just part of the work.  

Dancers Phil Chan and Georgina Pazcoguin disagreed.  They launched a movement called Final Bow For Yellow Face, which aimed to end the use of such caricatures.  Jennifer Lin’s documentary “About Face: Disrupting Ballet” follows Chan and Pazcoguin’s efforts, which include creating new choreography allowing these ballets to evolve to be part of a more diverse future.

The titular Eve in Julia Kwan’s 1970s-set Sundance Jury Award-winner “Eve And The Fire Horse” practices a type of religious diversity involving exploring different religions and blending together the bits she likes.  This attitude irritates her fundamentalist Christian older sister Kareena.  But then, Kareena and the children' s superstitious parents aren’t too surprised.  As Eve was born in the year of the Fire Horse, she’s presumed to display an uncontrollable nature.

Like Kwan’s film, Steven Okizaki’s documentary “The Only Language She Knows” is both a restoration and a period piece.  It’s a portrait of the current San Francisco Poet Laureate Genny Lim.  Not only will the viewer get images of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1980s, but they’ll also see such Asian American artists as Amy Hill (“Ballard”) and Kelvin Han Yee (“Beef”) in their early days.  What makes this screening unique is that Okizaki’s documentary hasn’t been screened for more than 40 years.

The last of the restorations to be mentioned here is Patrick Tam’s “Love Massacre.”   This Hong Kong New Wave classic would re-orient legendary HK film actress Brigitte Lin’s career away from her previous golden girl romantic roles.  Incidentally, the film’s also set in late 1970s-early 1980s San Francisco.

Ivy (Lin) is a college student trying to help her depressed friend Joy bounce back from a breakup.  Along the way, she accidentally becomes involved with Joy’s brother Chu Chung.  But her friend’s brother carries a couple of very relevant secrets.  First, he’s married.  Second, he has a hereditary mental illness that can cause him to get very violent.  Ivy will find out firsthand when Chung launches a killing spree in Ivy’s dormitory.  

Missed the Mill Valley and S.F. IndieFest screenings of Lillian T. Mehrel’s award-winning comedy “Honeyjoon?”  Don’t miss out on your new chance to see this rich comedy about a semi-thorny mother-daughter relationship.  June and her mother Lela are taking a vacation in the Azores.  But plans by the two women to use the getaway to process the recent loss of a family member soon run into problems.  The other tourists in the area happen to be honeymooners.  Lela’s obsessed with following developments in the “Women Life Freedom” protests in Iran.  June wants to find a guy to party with, but it’s hard to think about sex when she’s sharing a bed with her mother and the older woman is also visibly unhappy with the skimpy bikini she wears a lot.

A decidedly non-maternal relationship exists between the female leads of Jing Ai Ng’s crime dramedy “Forge.”  In Miami, talented art school dropout Coco Zhang produces the fake paintings for the art forgery scam she runs with her brother Raymond.   The illicit sales keep their money woes at bay but don’t solve them.  An opportunity to rake in big money arrives courtesy of Holden Beaumont, member of a prominent art collecting family.  But Beaumont’s sketchy motivations might not be what undoes his “business arrangement” with the Zhangs.  That honor goes to FBI Agent Emily Lee (Kelly Marie Tran), who works for the Bureau’s Art Crimes section.  She’s encountered other examples of Coco’s forgeries and is determined to track down their maker.

A different sort of fakery is practiced by ex-engineer Warren King, the subject of Curtis Chin’s documentary short “Warren King: King Of Cardboard.”  He uses cardboard, not stone, to create modern-age “terra-cotta” warriors which honors his local community.

Chin’s short is just one of six films in the program “Shifts And Dreams,”  The theme of these fiction and non-fiction pieces is labor.  The program also includes such shorts as “Sole” (documentary about a dedicated Korean-American cobbler in Nashville, TN), “Gilbert Gong - The Heart Of Lincoln Square” (documentary about an Oakland Chinatown recreation director trying to rally community pride via a neglected park), and “Milk And Honey” (drama about a Filipina nurse who struggles to reunite with her daughter after leaving The Philippines to chase the American Dream). 

Valerie Soe’s documentary “The Auntie Sewing Squad Resistance Playbook” recounts the story of performance artist Kristina Wong and her Auntie Sewing Squad.  Back in 2020, during the Angry Orange Toddler’s mishandling of the government response to the outbreak of COVID in America, Wong launched the Squad.  The BIPOC women in the grassroots group had sewing skills, and they used them to make and donate masks for vulnerable communities of color.  What began as a few dozen volunteers sewing in their living rooms eventually became a nationwide network of 800 activists.  In their way, these aunties had a firsthand encounter with not only the U.S. healthcare system’s inequities but also community solidarity actions to address these inequities.

If you listened to the establishment Democrats and the mainstream media, the Uncommitted National Movement was a group of anti-Semitic troublemakers trying to undermine U.S.-Israel relations.  The group could supposedly also be blamed for helping inflict a second dance with the Senile Orange Buffoon on America.  Razi Jafri’s documentary “Uncommitted,” which counts W. Kamau Bell as its executive producer, presents a far more nuanced story of this movement.  Michigan Arab and Muslim grassroots activists wanted then-President Biden to push for a Gaza ceasefire, an arms embargo on Israel, and accountability to the grassroots from Democratic Party leadership.  The inaction of the incumbent president and the later silence of his successor Kamala Harris on these issues sparked hundreds of thousands of voters to mark their ballots “uncommitted.”  Was this bottom-up movement wrong to make its demands?  Certainly Democratic Party leadership’s handling of the Uncommitted movement showed that they lacked clean hands and composure.  But that’s something worth discussing during the post-screening Q&A.

Check out these and other CAAMFest films here.  Following the above suggestions to the letter matters less than discovering films at CAAMFest that will work for you.