Colorado Dragon Boat Film Festival Fires Up Community

This year, the Colorado Dragon Boat Film Festival is rolling out the red carpet for one of our own.

Denver born-and-raised actress Ji-Young Yoo will return to the Mile High City to receive the inaugural Golden Dragon Award at the celebrated festival's ninth edition, which runs from Thursday, March 14, through Sunday, March 17, at the Sie FilmCenter.

The award will be presented at a screening of Yoo's film Smoking Tigers (Friday, March 15, 7 p.m.), and recognizes film-industry creatives who have done significant work to uplift and celebrate the AANHPI (Asian-American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander) community.

Yoo isn't just a former Denverite; the Korean-American actress has steadily been collecting accolades for increasingly high-profile roles over the past few years, most recently in Amazon's soapy, suspenseful miniseries Expats. Her character in Expats, Mercy, is an impulsive young gig worker who becomes involved with a tragedy in a wealthy Hong Kong family of transplanted Americans. Yoo's well-drawn work stands out among a strong female ensemble, which includes Nicole Kidman's grieving matriarch, Margaret.

In Smoking Tigers, she plays Hayoung, a lonely teenager painfully coming of age amid her parents' divorce while attending an elite summer boot camp. The intimate portrait nabbed a Best Performance award at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, and Yoo will be joined after the film on Friday for a Q&A with the film's director, Shelly Yo, and its producer, Guo Guo.
The annual fest represents the cinematic side of the AANHPI-focused Colorado Dragon Boat Festival, founded in 2001 and held each summer at Sloan's Lake. The nonprofit Colorado Dragon Boat, which manages both events, has seen a big bounce-back after two tough pandemic seasons in 2020 and 2021, when the films went virtual and the main festival was canceled entirely.

"It's been really great to be back in person," says executive director Sara Moore. "I'd say that's my favorite thing, having the opportunity to bring everyone back together and celebrate all the amazing accomplishments coming from our community. We really are a community that comes together to support each other."

That support brought the last two years of events some of their all-time biggest numbers. Almost a quarter-million people attended the annual June festival last year. "Same with the film festival," Moore adds. "It's been growing ever since."

Growth allows the film festival to offer much more than just movies, with several interactive events aiming to explore the many layers of AANHPI identity. A vendor marketplace on Saturday, March 16, will showcase a diverse crowd of local makers, and two community conversations will explore the experience of Asian-American adoptees and connections through food within the AANHPI community. Both the marketplace and the conversations are free and open to the public.

An especially can't-miss item from the non-film lineup is a tasting experience on Sunday, March 17, at 11 a.m. (tickets are $27.31). Titled Taste the Stories, the event includes more than a dozen of the metro's hottest and most scrumptious restaurants from within the community, including Sap Sua, Adobo, Kokoro, Riceboxx, Sweet Rice Flour and Die Die Must Try. The culinary experience is "always back by popular demand," confirms Moore. "We can't have an event without food." Her team not only combs the area each year for delicious spots to include, but also maintains a partnership with Mile-High Asian Food Week.
Food is also at the heart of opening-night film Happy Sandwich (Thursday, March 14, 7 p.m.). In the docu-fiction hybrid, Okinawan BBQ chef Shogo Manna receives an unusual request: to make a sandwich for a god. This challenge sends him trucking on a quest through the island's cuisine, a journey that becomes as philosophical as it is mouthwatering.

Moore notes that breaking bread aligns well with this year's theme, Connecting Through Cultures. "What that means for us is providing an opportunity for people to come to our festival and experience culture, in many different formats, many different ways, not only film," she explains. "Everyone loves food, and it's a great opportunity to learn about culture."

The theme of connecting through cultures also inspired Moore and her programming team to step outside of their usual selection guidelines to include one of the festival's most unique, passionate documentaries. "In addition to sharing our cultures under the large umbrella of AANHPI, [we're also] showcasing an Indigenous film from Alaska in order to help another marginalized, underserved community be seen and share their stories," Moore says.

That film, One With the Whale (Saturday, March 16, 4:30 p.m.), follows an Indigenous family in the Bering Sea island community of St. Lawrence. In a rite of passage passed down for centuries, Chris Apassingok becomes the youngest person ever to harpoon a whale for his village, but he's devastated by the online rage his triumph inspires. The doc investigates the balance of cultural pressures both ancient and modern, in a unique look at American life in the 21st century.

One of the film's subjects, Susan Apassingok, will be making the 3,000-plus mile trek to Denver from the tiny island community, which is closer to Russia than the rest of the United States. She'll be in attendance Saturday for a conversation following the documentary. Dragon Boat's films have traditionally screened at the Sie, the East Colfax theater-and-bar combo operated by fellow arts nonprofit and festival partners Denver Film. Programming is split between the two teams, with Denver Film's longtime festival artistic director Matt Campbell and programming manager Ambriehl Turrentine handling most of the features.

Other highlights from the lineup include the Filipino comedy Becky and Badette, following a pair of inseparable middle-aged besties on the cusp of unlikely viral stardom; and the Chinese blockbuster Moon Man, in which an astronaut survives a catastrophe caused by an Earth-bound asteroid, only to find himself as "the last human in the universe." On the Dragon Boat side, the shorts and other decisions are handled by a highly accomplished local committee of artists and organizers, all of whom happen to be women. That includes co-chair Dr. Elaine Yang, who was instrumental in creating the film festival back in 2016. Nine years later, she's still here — and so are we, ready to enjoy one of Dragon Boat Film Festival's best seasons yet.

Colorado Dragon Boat Film Festival runs from Thursday, March 14, through Sunday, March 17, at the Sie FilmCenter, 2510 East Colfax Avenue. Individual tickets for films are $15; all-access passes are $75. Find tickets, passes and the full schedule at eventive.org.