Asians offer filming of the green

Jeremy Liu likes the story of a Chinese-American acquaintance whose long foray into working for the National Park Service began after his parents read an article about job growth in the environmental field.

Whether for practical or passionate reasons, Liu wants to see more Asian-Americans involved in environmental issues.

And so when Sato Asaoka, a former film festival director in Tokyo, took a summer internship last year at Liu's Chinatown nonprofit, the Asian Community Development Corp., it was only natural that their interests melded to produce Boston's first environmental film festival, one with an Asian-American flavor.

The festival, "Stories from the Land: Environmental Films from the Asian Diaspora," runs through next Sunday, with films being shown at Tufts University's Boston and Medford campuses, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Peabody Essex Museum.

In addition to compelling stories on the big screen, the festival offers talks by filmmakers, question-and-answer sessions, and panel discussions.

"The neat thing is that we're actually integrating information and panelists, who are actively working in the field, [to talk] about how you get involved," said Liu, festival coproducer. "It's kind of like a bait and switch."

With films touching on stories of life after Chernobyl's nuclear accident, flooding threats to a Himalayan village due to global warming, and illnesses in Iraq linked to depleted uranium ammunition, Asaoka, 29, emphasizes the universality of environmental issues.

"Some films might deal with local issues, but those issues can relate to us," said Asaoka. "Films screened in these film festivals are made very sensitively and take a lot of time to make. It's very different from news articles. So people can understand [environmental issues] more deeply."

Major cities like Tokyo and Berlin and locales across the US and in France, Italy, Portugal, Russia, and the Czech Republic host environmental film festivals every year or two, Asaoka said.

She was surprised to learn that Boston had none. But with its mix of urban and green space and its openness to other cultures, she said, "I think Boston is one of the best places to hold an environmental film festival."

Asaoka worked for the Tokyo-based group Earth Vision for almost four years, and returned to Japan after her Boston internship to briefly work for its Ministry of Environment.

Collaboration on a festival focusing on environmental issues was welcomed by the staff of Boston's Asian American Resource Workshop. The workshop has run Asian-American film festivals in Boston for a number of years, but it was involved in a time-consuming 25th-anniversary fund-raiser this year, said Ching-In Chen, 26, who started as the workshop's director of programs this summer.

The Asian-American festivals had started in 1981 as a "huge film screening" and had "mutated" over the years, Chen said, into "multimedia festivals which had film as a component." The group uses art to promote activism and welcomed the opportunity, with the environmental theme, to participate in a relatively new field for Asian-Americans, Chen said.

"It seemed to make sense to focus the Asian-American film programming on environmental issues, and it had never been done before," Chen said.

Because the approach was so novel, Chen said, she had to go through considerable legwork to find films for the Asian-American segments she had taken on.

Many of her selections are by community activists, including a new film, "My Backyard," which was featured Thursday by the Roxbury-based Alternatives for Community & Environment.

Still, Chen said she anticipates a growth in environmental film-making, as people turn to increasingly available digital videos to document local stories. Environmental activism is also broadening, she said, to include not only hazardous-waste cleanup and asthma prevention, but also monitoring gentrification and affordable housing availability. "It's being able to live a decent life where we live, work, and play."

Lest potential viewers fear that the films will bombard the senses with depressing landscapes and angry protesters, Asaoka describes some of her favorites as documentaries that both move and charm.

"Alexei and the Spring," directed by Seiichi Motohashi, describes life in a Belarussian village near Chernobyl.

Motohashi, also a professional photographer, has compiled beautiful images that don't dwell on the nuclear accident but show the strength of villagers, Asaoka said. "You can sense that they enjoy life."

"Wrapped in Green," by director Keming Zhang, depicts an ordinary woman battling both the Chinese government and her family by collecting used batteries after reading an article about the effects of batteries on the environment, Asaoka said.

Her husband becomes frustrated with her. "In the middle of the film, he says, 'I will divorce you,' and she cries."

Asaoka said she wants to see the festival become an annual event, if she can find someone to take over when she returns to Japan in January. She already has plans for February, when she returns to Boston to focus on nuclear proliferation.

"Next April we want to make another film festival, I and another professor at Tufts," Asaoka said.

For more information, see www.storiesfromtheland.org and www.aarw.org/programs/pdf/filmfest2004.pdf or call 617-627-3453.