11th Slant Film Fest: Bringing Bold Cinematic Visions to Houston

. Chanse plays six different characters, including a self-important spoken word artist named Truth Is Real, who is really, really bad.

"PIA," directed by Tanuj Chopra , is a sci-fi love story about the convergence of technology and the human soul. It stars Pia Shah as a malfunctioning android in the year 2063.

J.P. Chan’s "Digital Antiquities " is another sci-fi tale, set in the year 2036.It follows a young man named Kai, who is desperately seeking the owner of a store grumpy old technology to dig some information out of this cycle bright old thing called Compact Disc.

Finally, Soham Mehta "Fatakra" ("firecracker" in Gujarati), which won a Student Academy Award this year, Naveen (Samrat Chakrabarti) nervously awaits a meeting with his wife and son, he left behind in India Three years ago he came to Texas to work. The film will be present with Mehta.  

Hyphen had a chance to ask Melissa a few questions about this year’s festival and Asian American filmmaking in general:

These particular films were part of ITVS's Futurestates  series, so they were commissioned and part of the commission was that they had to address issues in America's future. ITVS was interested in diverse filmmakers for their commissions, so there are actually a few artists I've shown over the years at Slant who were asked to pitch ideas for this series.I think many of the issues that Asian American filmmakers might be interested in (society, history, relations between peoples and cultures) are themes that are prevalent in science fiction. While these two films can be science fiction, in the heart they are stories about love and loss dressed with technology and androids. The public film festival is a small subset of the general population. So there are many needs in terms of mainstream media. You still find very stereotyped portrayals of Asians in mainstream media; actors of color still find it hard to land roles, and even historical dramas (like AMC's new "Hell on Wheels," which is set during the building of the Transcontinental Railroad) manage to leave us out completely.

Bayou City Film News: CITY OF HOUSTON FILM COMMISSION SCREENING ROOM

I had a chance to stop by Houston city hall recently. I have to admit I hadn't been down there in quite a few years. It was my first ever visit to the city of Houston's visitors center. I went for a test screening for a local filmmakers work and had no idea the in the visitors center is a small 48 seat screening room. While I can't talk about the film here, the screening room itself was a nice surprise. More Houston filmmakers should utilize this space to screen their projects in order to get feedback during the post production faze. Click on the Houston Film Commission link below for more info.

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