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‘There are no risks for us in Hollywood. We deliver the bill or the dry-cleaning, do our karate chop and leave,” said actor Sung Kang at Thursday night’s opening of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. 

Say goodbye to pidgen-speaking sidekicks, chop suey slapstick and bad dubbing. This year’s festival is about valedictorians-gone-awry, thoughful politics and stylish craftsmanship. 

And it all started in Berkeley. 

The Bay Area’s first Asian American film festival took place at the Pacific Film Archives in 1982. The 13 films were part of a traveling show from New York’s Asian CineVision. 

This year’s series, produced independently by the National Asian American Telecommunications Association, features 135 films and videos. The festival plays not only at the Pacific Film Archives, but also at theaters in San Francisco and San Jose. 

Festival Director Chi-Hui Yang said this year’s 20th- anniversary event hopes to be a kind of Asian American Cinema 101 class. 

Playing on the 20-year theme, Yang said, “We’re trying to provide a 20/20 look into the past and the future of Asian American film.” 

The festival will dip into the archives – bringing back pieces like Flower Drum Song (1961) – and also is making room for up-and-comers like “Better Luck Tomorrow,” which features Kang as part of a young, hip cast. 

Directed by Justin Lin, “Better Luck Tomorrow” was one of the most talked about features at last month’s Sundance Film Festival. The neo-noir about clever high schoolers who are just as obsessed with getting around the rules as getting into college was also just picked up by MTV Films for nationwide distribution.  

Asian American filmmaking has come a long way since Wayne Wang’s “Chan is Missing,” the first Asian American film to make it big (relatively speaking). Wang’s film, which follows two Chinese Americans through San Francisco’s Chinatown in search of their disappeared business partner, premiered at the PFA in 1981.  

“It’s a breakthrough film both because it was ultra low-budget – he did it himself as an independent film – and also because of its subject matter, the Asian-American community,” said PFA staffer Shelley Diekman. 

Diekman said the PFA, which will be showing seven films this year, is proud to have a newly restored print of this landmark film to show again on Sunday. 

Berkeley residents – whether they are of Asian American descent or just foreign film lovers – seem to flock to Asian American movies, said Diekman. 

Next Wednesday’s showing of “Daugher from Denang,” produced and co-directed by Berkeley resident Gail Dolgin, is already sold out. The documentary, which follows one of the American-raised children involved in “Operation Babylift” at the end of the Vietnam War as she reunites with her Vietnamese mother 20 years later, won the highest prize for documentaries at the Sundance Festival. Good thing it will soon be showing on PBS television, said Diekman. 

In addition to Dolgin’s film, this year’s slate includes many films with local connections. Not only is there an entire program called “415/510 Local Calls” playing at the AMC Kabuki Theatre in San Francisco on March 9 and 12, but Berkeley resident Louise Lo’s documentary “The Floating World: Masami Teraoka and his Art” is making its world debut at the Kabuki on March 11. 

Lo said Berkeley has proved a creative environment for artists. “People like us gravitate to Berkeley,” said Lo, who works at KQED in San Francisco. “There are lots of grassroots arts – small galleries, galleries in people’s homes. It’s also a very literate community that has an emphasis on storytelling.” 

But, actually producing an Asian American film is another question entirely. When Lo first approached major funders for her documentary, she got a dismissive response. 

“They said he [Teraoka] was not well-known enough. It’s hard for Asian American artists to be treated like a Jackson Pollack or a Wayne Thibault even if they’re just as strongly represented in museums,” said Lo, who has also made documentaries on Thibault and Frida Kahlo. 

Lo’s film is a sensitive biography of Teraoka’s artistic development, starting with his “sketch boy” days during World War II when American soldiers stationed in Japan exchanged gifts for drawings of their girlfriends. Though Teraoka is best known for ukiyo-e works, in which geishas might be flourishing condoms or kabuki actors might be gawking at big-boned white women in bikinis, Lo follows the artist through to his current interest in looser forms and turn to a brooding, expressionist palette. 

Lo’s film, like Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow,” tries to describe the Asian American experience without having to throw in the standard exoticisms about East vs. West to tell the story. 

Participants in the festival hope that this can be a trend. Lin said Thursday he was glad that an Asian American film that was not about immigration or family issues á la “Joy Luck Club” could be made. And the actors were glad that they now have something to put on their preview tapes other than delivery boy roles. 

“The roles in this film were not one-dimensional, or a mold that they they made for us,” said Kang, whose character in “Better Luck Tomorrow” is both bully and bullied. “We could go in, work with the director, develop the character. It’s a dream come true.”