2026 Poster Design by Zand Gee

Coming to CAAMFest 2026! First screening since 1983!

San Francisco’s first Chinese American Poet Laureate Genny Lim has been a vital force in the cultural, social and political life of the Bay Area for more than forty years - since the 1980 premiere of her groundbreaking play Paper Angels, which told the story of Chinese immigrants detained on Angel Island.

The Only Language She Knows captures Genny, an enthralling writer and performer, early in her early, exploring her voice while raising two lively children and living with her mother in a changing Chinatown.

The film, shot in three days with no budget, was a collaboration of Asian American artists during the unemployed stage of their careers.  It was the second film by Steven Okazaki, who received his first Oscar nomination two years later and won an Oscar five years after that.  Producer Amy Hill, then acting with San Francisco’s Asian American Theater Company, has been seen most recently in main roles on Magnum P.I. and Ballard, and heard on Kung Fu Panda.  The film also features pop-up appearances by the late great Victor Wong and Dennis Dun who went on to co-star in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China; and Kelvin Han Yee, the star of Peter Wang’s A Great Wall, familiar for his tv performances in Beef, Law & Order and Glow.