Daniel Wu's 吳彥祖 AliveNotDead.com and Hollywood Stories

I've just found from the SFIAAF (San Francisco's International Asian American Film Festival) about the great artist community site Alive Not Dead (http://www.alivenotdead.com/), which was found by Daniel Wu 吳彥祖, Conroy Chan 陳子聰, Andrew Lin 連凱 and Terence Yin 尹子維.

AnD is dedicated to strengthen and connect the artist communities worldwide. The site provides artists a platform to connect with their audience as well as other artists. Artists can share their creative works, and seek opportunities to collaborate with each other.

In the AnD spotlight today, I learned that Anthony Ng who is a former child actor in Hong Kong graduated from NYU Film School. His award winning short films helped him secure grants for his first feature film "212" that premiered at Sundance… And Anthony is just one of many great talents (many are Chinese) I found from the site. I am so excited!

In the SFIAAF panel discussion, Daniel Wu told us how "turned off" he was about the Hollywood productions years ago. He remembered people were not as interested in him after they found out he was an American born Chinese and therefore not really from "the Orient". Then, in the production of Around the World in 80 Days, he was asked to speak in English with Chinese accents – the caricaturized version of it. I could imagine how he felt.

But situation has changed. Since the turn of millennium, China's global economy share has increased from 1/3 to 1/2 of the US. Bollywood now produces more films and has more audience than Hollywood. US filmmakers finally recognize Asia as the untapped market. Many of them are educating themselves about Asian market and artists.

Things are heading to the right direction. Keep it going that way!