Poster courtesy of the Sacramento Asian Pacific Film Festival

The first ever Sacramento Asian Pacific Film Festival (www.sapff.org) happens this weekend. The two day festival (Friday, May 29 through Saturday, May 30) features 27 films across five separate screenings at the Guild Theatre, located at 2828 35th Street. Tickets are $10-$15 per screening, and $40-$60 for a full-festival pass.

The five different screening events are broken up by category: A comedy screening (4:30 p.m. on Friday, May 29th) will include the feature films Kung Phooey, Love Arcadia and Miss India America; an animation screening (10:30 a.m. on Saturday, May 30th) features full-length film Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles, plus six short films; a food-film screening (1 p.m. on Saturday, May 30) offers six films all less than an hour long, including one about sriracha; a documentary screening (4 p.m. on Saturday, May 30) features four films and a musical performance; and an open-submissions screening (7 p.m. on Saturday, May 30) features six films by up-and-coming filmmakers.

Last year, SN&R wrote about the genesis of the film festival, which has been in the works for a few years. Following that, the festival showed The Slanted Screen, a documentary by Sacramento-born Jeff Adachi which tells the story of how Asian-American men on television and in films are typecast—mostly into degrading roles. Then in October, it offered a program of Asian horror films to coincide with Halloween.

SAPFF executive producer Jason Jong told SN&R last year that he’d like Sacramentans to have “a regionally relevant cultural-arts venue for traditional and contemporary Asian and Pacific Islander arts.” This festival, billed as “the signature event of the Sacramento Asian Pacific Cultural Village,” seems to be the first step in that direction.