15 Short films you shouldn’t miss at the 23rd San Diego Asian Film Festival

By Asian Film Festival on October 30, 2022 • ( Leave a comment )

These are fifteen short films you shouldn’t miss at the San Diego Asian Film Festival which will take place from November 3 – 12, 2022.

**A Man Trembles** by Mark Chua, Lam Li Shuen – Singapore | 2021 – 23 minutes

Set during the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis, a family of three plot an otherworldly escape at Sentosa Island. (SDAFF 2022)

Trailer:

**All I Ever Wanted** by Ein Lau – USA | 2022 – 15 minutes

Rom-com obsessed Christine discovers her Prince Charming is not what she imagined him to be, in this queer love story that rescues a genre-in-distress from its outdated ideals.(SDAFF 2022)

**All I Want is Everything** by Alexandra Cuerdo – USA | 2022 – 17 minutes

Echoes of Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow reverberate through this pulsing tale of an Asian baddie’s by-any-means-necessary approach to college admissions.(SDAFF 2022)

Trailer:

**Further and Further Away** by Polen Ly – Cambodia | 2022 -24 minutes

Two indigenous Bunong siblings plan to move to the city in search of better opportunities. But first, haunted by dreams, one wants to visit the village where her parents died.(SDAFF 2022)

Trailer:

**Good Day** by Zhang Zhi-teng – Taiwan | 2021 – 19 minutes

A hapless father decides to go golfing during a typhoon—only his golf clubs are at the home of a wife trying to divorce him. (SDAFF 2022)

Trailer:

**In the Big Yard Inside the Teeny-Weeny Pocket** by Yoko Yuki – Japan | 2022 – 6 minutes

Featuring cryptic, puzzle-in-a-puzzle lines like “the cabbage on the roof goes kaboom,” this hand-drawn, totally freewheeling animation is a mystery and delight. (SDAFF 2022)

Trailer:

**It’s Raining Frogs Outside** by Maria Estela Paiso – Philippines | 2022 – 14 minutes

A young woman returns home at the end of the world, where it’s raining frogs outside. She’s despondent, alone, pushed to the edge of visceral discomfort, and tortured by her memories and the house itself. (SDAFF 2022)

Trailer:

**Lucky Fish** by Emily May Jampel – USA | 2022 – 8 minutes

Two teenage girls meet in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant while having dinner with their families. (SDAFF 2022)

Trailer:

**Lunchbox** by Anne Hu – USA | 2022 – 16 minutes

Three recipes—zongzi, turnip cake, and hand cut noodles—release painful memories baked into beloved foods. (SDAFF 2022)

**Maneki** by Brandon Okumura – USA | 2022 – 13 minutes

When she asks out her crush, a cashier at a ramen restaurant must face the emotional and professional consequences of being rejected by a customer. (SDAFF 2022)

**Murder Tongue** by Ali Sohail Jaura – Pakistan | 2022 – 18 minutes

The brutal oppression of Urdu speakers in 1990s Karachi is vividly dramatized in this heartfelt work of protest and remembrance, in which parents search for their missing son. (SDAFF 2022)

Trailer:

**Persona** by Sujin Moon – South Korea | 2022 – 6 minutes

Anime, cuteness, and body horror converge in this unsettling unpeeling of the surfaces we inhabit. (SDAFF 2022)

Trailer:

**Rebolusyon** by Coza – USA | 2022 – 4 minutes

San Diego’s AnakBayan Organization heads to the Philippine Consulate General in Los Angeles to protest against Philippine President Marcos Jr., and his choice to continue Duterte’s bloody war. (SDAFF 2022)

**The Blessing** by Ziyao Liu – USA | 2022 – 5 minutes

An international filmmaking student struggles to make a video for her mother’s wedding. Grief, stress, and loneliness deconstruct the fabric of her blessing. (SDAFF 2022)

**Will You Look At Me** by Shuli Huang – China | 2022 – 20 minutes

A lushly shot exploration of time, about homophobia that stays and sticks and harms, about complicated histories and relationships and love, and what forgiveness might look like when it’s a gift you give yourself. (SDAFF 2022)

Trailer: