AAARI Events

Razid Season, filmmaker and alum of The City College of New York, Elijah, a coming-out story of a second-generation Bengali-American who desires to live life fully as a man in a trans-phobic immigrant culture.

Join the American Malayali Heritage Foundation for a vital panel discussion challenging cultural norms and prioritizing women’s holistic well-being.

Across the globe, millions of people continue to face systemic discrimination, exclusion, and unequal opportunities based entirely on their inherited status, descent, or ancestral occupation. While deeply associated with the caste system in South Asia, these rigid intergenerational hierarchies affect diverse global populations, including the Roma in Europe, Haratine in Africa, Buraku in Japan, Osu ... Read more

Films in this year’s CUNY Shorts Showcase, part of the 49th Asian American International Film Festival deal with topics/genres including: an intimate connection of hope and solidarity between a Filipino steward and a Black welder in 1940s Brooklyn, a Sikh MMA fighter navigating the balance between faith and the brutal world of combat sports, a ... Read more

A fall retrospective of nine preserved films by Christine Choy, the pioneering documentarian who spent five decades filming the movements and communities left out of the record. Films Screening at Anthology Film Archives (Sept 9 to 13, 2026) “Teach our Children”, “Inside Women Inside”, “From Spikes to Spindles”, “Fei Tien… Goddess in Flight”, “To Love, ... Read more

Across Continents employs Goan literary subjectivity as epistemology to critique a specific limitation of postcolonial thought, one that does not account for the situations or afterlife of Portuguese colonialism.

Join Thirdworld Newsreel and the Documentary Forum at CCNY for a discussion with cinematographer Tinx Chan, named an American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) “Rising Star” in 2023, and past CUNY Asian American Film Festival participant.

Join Third World Newsreel and the Documentary Forum at CCNY for a special screening and Q&A featuring The Gas Station Attendant. This intimate documentary follows H. N. Shantha Murthy’s remarkable journey from escaping extreme poverty in an Indian village to a life-changing encounter that brought him to Texas.

This book explores how Manhattan’s Koreatown transformed into a “transclave”—a commercialized ethnic hub driven by South Korea’s global nation-branding strategy and the diverse cultural mosaic of New York City.

Author Abigail Savitch-Lew will discuss her debut novel Livonia Chow Mein — a gripping, four-generation saga set in Brownsville, Brooklyn, centered on a Chinese family-owned restaurant and its deep roots in a neighborhood shaped by waves of immigrant and working-class communities.

Author Anisa Rahim will discuss her book, An American Meo, a hybrid work of nonfiction, fiction, and myth that explores identity, heritage, and the weight of generational memory.

Author Kaila Yu as she discusses her memoir-in-essays, Fetishized, exploring how she reclaimed her identity after growing up in a media culture that forced Asian women to sexualize themselves to be seen.