It’s that time of the year, when Hollywood pays renewed attention to Asian cinema thanks to the Asian World Film Festival, now celebrating its 7^th edition and steadily growing thanks to the tireless efforts of West African-born, Lebanon and France-educated Georges N. Chamchoum, the Festival’s Executive and Program Director.

The Asian World Film Festival opened this year in Los Angeles with Eternals (director Chloé Zhao and some of the cast are Asians) on November 1 and will close on November 11 after showing about 40 films from more or less every country in Asia, expanding its horizon this year to include African regions.

The festival hands out the Snow Leopard Award, which for the first time this year was designed by Vietnamese artist Sir Daniel Winn; also starting this year, the Bruce Lee Foundation will give an Award to an artist who has excelled in the field of martial arts in cinema. The first recipient, honored by Shannon Lee, daughter of Bruce Lee, will be Andy Cheng, a member of the Jackie Chan team, who supervised the fight choreography in the popular film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.  The festival will close with South Korea’s Oscar-submitted film Escape From Mogadishu.  

We spoke with Georges Chamchoum the morning after the highly successful opening night gala at the Landmark Theater in Los Angeles, attended by Cambodian Princess Norodom Arunrasmy, who is in town for a few weeks.

Mr. Chamchoum, the Asian World Film Festival has exponentially grown in just a few years. Can you tell us about it?

The festival has really grown, although it has been extremely challenging over the last two years. Los Angeles is the city of entertainment. But in the past six or seven years it has become the city of political correctness. We are here to entertain people, not to tell them what to do. You don’t teach people – that’s patronizing the audience. I want to go back to people’s love for movies and do so while embracing diverse culture – that’s what our festival is about. We know how important the Black Lives Matter and the #Me Too movements are – we don’t need people to tell us about this. To me is absolutely important that we are here to cater to the audience and let them find enjoyment. After two years of sadness and death, now let’s enjoy and be entertained. I want Hollywood’s heyday to come back, and I want the Asian World Film Festival to be leading the way towards it!   

What about the selection of the movies?

That was a huge challenge because of the Oscars’ deadline. Usually 80 percent of our program are Oscar- and Golden Globes-submitted movies. This year, the later deadline to November 1 jeopardized our program, so instead of 80% this year only 60% of our program is made of major Award-submitted films. But we keep accepting movies, even as we are starting the festival!

What about your audience?

That was another challenge. People couldn’t come this year from China, Malaysia or Indonesia, but many have come from Central Europe and I have some people coming from other parts of Europe after November 8. And this year we opened to African nations from which we have five movies and one sneak preview of a work in progress; it’s an African movie called Don of Thunder, which is from a big animation studio in Lagos, in  Nigeria.   

The Asian film industry has gained a lot of attention in the last seven years, right?

Yes, attention has grown in the last seven years. When we started the Festival in 2015, only six Asian movies had won the Foreign Language Oscars, which for me was unacceptable when you know the quality of movies coming from Asia, especially from South Korea. There should have been at least 12 nominated films, but it wasn’t until the big wins of Parasite that people paid attention. For me Korea literally reinvented the language of cinema. That’s why we started this Festival, to shed a light on Asian cinema. And out of brotherhood, we decided to include African films too.