Vancouver Asian Film Festival marks 30 years with the film that started it all 

Thirty years after Shopping for Fangs opened the inaugural Vancouver Asian Film Festival (VAFF), the independent dark comedy returns to the film event. It’s both a historical marker and a reminder of what independent filmmaking can set in motion.

Shopping for Fangs will open VAFF on Nov. 5, beginning an 11-day celebration of Asian Canadian and global Asian diaspora cinema. Co-directed by award-winning queer filmmaker Quentin Lee and Justin Lin, who has helmed several Fast & Furious movies and the film Star Trek Beyond, which also marked actor John Cho’s theatrical feature debut, Shopping for Fangs premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 1997 before heading west to VAFF.

For Lee, the screening will complete an unfinished chapter; he and Lin missed the original VAFF presentation because they were travelling.

“I’m very excited because I felt like, now, I could finally attend the screening and actually have a renewed look at the film,” said Lee, who splits his time between Los Angeles and Vancouver. “It’s really like a full circle coming back, and I feel like a homecoming queen or king. If Justin comes, then he can be the king, I’ll be the queen.”

Shopping for Fangs follows several Asian American characters in Los Angeles whose intersecting identity crises take on strange, transformative forms. One man believes he may be turning into a werewolf; a married woman receives seductive phone calls; and a young gay photographer and armchair philosopher spends a lot of time sitting and observing in a local coffee shop.

The film’s genre play, sexual politics and gender identity themes pushed beyond the kinds of stories about Asian North American life that were then landing on mainstream screens.

“When we made Shopping for Fangs, we particularly wanted to make something that is different from a Joy Luck Club or even Double Happiness,” Lee said adding, at a time when there was little gay Asian content, he wanted queer characters to be part of the ensemble rather than lingering out on the margins. “The lesbianism and the homosexuality become sort of a metaphor for self-love.”

Being back at VAFF is a homecoming of sorts for Lee as festivals were essential to his own emergence as a filmmaker. His early shorts and features circulated through Asian North American and LGBTQ+ festivals, creating an audience and a network at a time when few other routes existed.

“Without these kinds of Asian North American festival supports, I wouldn’t really have become a filmmaker,” said Lee whose resume includes the films Ethan Mao, Drift, The People I’ve Slept With, and the award-winning comedy doc Rez Comedy.

VAFF founder Barbara Lee recognized the nerve of Shopping for Fangs when she programmed it three decades ago.

“You had to be bold back then to make any kind of breakthrough through the clutter,” Barbara Lee said. “It was unapologetically Asian and unapologetically different.”

Barbara Lee’s impulse to start VAFF came when she took her own short film to the Seattle Asian American International Film Festival because Vancouver had no equivalent. There, she saw Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, the 1994 biographical drama adapted from Vancouver’s Evelyn Lau’s bestselling memoir, starring a young Sandra Oh.