The Austin Asian American Film Festival lives in the old Highland Mall — reborn as AFS Cinema and a community-college campus — and on Centerpiece Night the building hums. We spent Friday there end to end, badges in hand, working the carpet for the festival’s biggest evening. Here’s how it went.
Into the mist
Before the carpet, there was the festival’s first-ever VR room. Up at the Holiday Inn Midtown, Taiwan Academy presented In the Mist, a poetic virtual-reality piece by Taipei director Chou Tung-Yen of Very Theatre — a Venice VR alum and Golden Horse nominee. Headsets on, an 18+ crowd drifted through it; back on the festival floor, Chou and his editor kept marveling at how young the whole operation felt. “The volunteers, the filmmakers, all the staff — so young,” he said. “You can really feel the vibes.”
The Taiwan VR team behind “In the Mist.”
The people who built it
A festival is really two things at once — the films on screen, and the small crew that spent a year deciding which ones get there. By late afternoon they were all on the carpet. Artistic director Neha Aziz walked us through a 34-film lineup from 20 countries and the lobby conversations she lives for; features programmers Joshua Martin (a decade in) and Tony Nguyen (who watched 100-plus features and runs the Dallas microcinema Spacy) talked picks. Coordinator Britney Salyer kept the machine running; event lead Catherine Vo admitted she wouldn’t catch a single movie all weekend — “I have no agenda other than making sure everyone’s having a good time” — and shorts programmer Alishba Javaid, who started as a 2022 volunteer, had a one-line pitch for anyone on the fence: “If you’ve never been to a film festival, 100% do it.”
The Mane Event
At 6:30 the carpet — “The Mane Event,” horse-girl/Texas-chic dress code and all — filled with filmmakers. On the narrative jury, Austin King of Fantastic Fest called the opening film “Honeyjoon” “very funny… and really hopeful,” and was blunt about the year’s loudest debate: “I want to see things made by people.” Fellow juror Yuta Yamaguchi, a returning AAAFF director, found himself on the other side of the table.
Then the filmmakers. Sophia Lim brought “Taemong,” built on the Korean tradition of a prophetic conception dream; Myles Matsuno and producer Lailanie Gadia brought the Texas premiere of “Light on a Hill,” about an Altadena burger joint that fed its neighbors after the LA fires; and Lisette Marie Flanary, off a Honolulu redeye, brought “Māhū,” her short on kumu hula Patrick Makuakāne and three Native Hawaiian artists. The most quotable of the night was Mahnoor Euceph, whose proof-of-concept short “11:11” — backed by an accelerator from Cate Blanchett, Coco Francini and Dr. Stacy L. Smith — came with a 50-year plan and a dream Benazir Bhutto biopic. What would it take to lure her from California to Austin? “Enough to make my film. I just need a few million.”
Mahnoor Euceph on her short “11:11.”
The centerpiece
It all pointed at Traces of Home, Colette Ghunim’s documentary about her father, who fled Palestine, and her mother, who left a difficult home in Mexico. Gunwant Kaur, a poet and healer there with Ghunim’s family, framed it best: the film, she said, “becomes an act of healing, and a project of collective healing.” After the screening came the Corral party at St. John Studios — paletas, a batch cocktail, and a festival exhaling after its biggest night.
The verdict
Driving back across town, one line kept surfacing about the whole evening: “It’s a great little festival, isn’t it?” That’s the thing about AAAFF — small enough that you end up in the lobby talking to the people who made every choice, big enough that the films come from 20 countries and the filmmakers fly in from Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, and Taipei to sit in a dark room with you. Eighteen years in, it still feels like a secret worth telling.
Watch all 29 red-carpet interviews on our red-carpet page, meet everyone in Voices from the Red Carpet, and see the full lineup in the AAAFF 2026 schedule. Coverage by Asia Film Fests & Austin Hangout.
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