The global is local in CAAMFest 2015, which imports more than a hundred movies from 20 countries, with several filmmakers hailing from throughout the Bay Area. Of the latter, one is documentarian Arthur Dong, this year's Spotlight honoree. Dong's new film The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor is a portrait of the physician and actor who won an Oscar for re-creating his own experience of Cambodian genocide in The Killing Fields. It's also a reminder, as is the whole festival, really, that movies have many ways of mattering to us. Oscar-winner Ruby Yang's A Moment in Time, to take another nonfiction example, reveals how the movie theaters of San Francisco's Chinatown have been both crucible and haven of immigrant assimilation. But the notion of cinema as a means to make sense of life is neither geographically nor temporally limited, and CAAMFest encourages reveling in pop culture universalism. As the fest's warmhearted opener reminds us, we were all an endearingly awkward international hodgepodge of horny angry funny endearing teenagers once, relating as complicatedly to our parents as to each other. Writer-director Benson Lee's Seoul Searching finds a lively gaggle of adolescent Korean expats summoned to their homeland for government-sponsored summer camp; cultural education is what's on the official agenda, but John Hughesian coming of age is what's in store. This seems like the perfect CAAMFest kickoff: generous, inclusive, and movie-lovingly true.
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