This weekend in the Bay Area is the 29th Annual San Francisco Asian American Film Festival hosted by the Center for Asian American Media I was debating going but thought to myself, “Nah…they’re probably only going to have East Asian American films featured and will completely ignore the South Asian American films…so why bother.” Then, I found this video on YouTube.

Well. I’ve been convinced. Now I have to go. A parody of the King’s Speech, the above clip features friends Pia Shah, Sunil Malhotra, and my buddy Rasika Mathur. And of course I’ll be at the film festival – The Taqwacores Motion Picture is screening, finally, in the Bay Area.

I was curious. What are these films on the list that called for Pia, Rasika and Sunil to create the above video? These are the South Asian-ish featured filums at this year’s festiwal:

From the Gala Presentations we have Upaj and the sequel to East is East, the new movie out of the UK West is West.

Under Special Presentations we have the classic Bend It Like Beckham and the abysmal It’s a Wonderful Afterlife. With Narratives, we have the Iranian film Dog Sweat and the American Muslim film The Taqwacores.

In Documentary is a fascinating film about surrogacy in India called Made in India.

In the Cinema Asia category there is the Tehran based film Gold and Copper as well as the Bollywood flick starring grey-eyed Ash, Raavanan. But the most fascinating in this category looks like Amin, a film documenting the legacy of a 105-year-old Qashqai classical vocalist.

Online you can partake in the festival too – there are a few selections that you can stream directly off of their site. One of the films is a short about an Indian in America trying to chase his dream – Fatakra.

There’s also a bunch of South Asian films in the “shorts” section, though much more difficult to find out on CAAM’s website and put into a list for you. I did find this charming interview with Anjoo Khosla who produced the 10 minute short about Wahid’s Mobile Bookstore which was filmed in India. And of course, the Grant St. Shaving Co. starring the darling Pia Shah from the promo video above. You can watch that one in entirety below.

As you might have guessed, by the time you read this you will have missed the opening weekend festivities. Not to worry though, the films will be screening all week long all the way through March 20th. Though I commend CAAM’s effort at trying to be inclusive to the South Asian film making narrative, I still do think they could have done just a bit more. Here’s to hoping that we have future South Asian film makers that will be stepping to the plate in the industry. And not in that M. Night Shyamalan way.