The 12th annual Vancouver Asian Film Festival kicked off at Cinemark Tinseltown last night, and it was the first time that founder Barbara Lee wasn’t helming the festival.

Don Montgomery, of ExplorAsian, has taken over executive director while Lee remains the president of the board of directors.

Things kicked off with the comedy Ping Pong Playa, directed by Academy Award winner Jessica Yu whose previous work screened at the inaugural VAFF. Yu was in attendance, along with her film’s lead actor and cowriter Jimmy Tsai, who stars as slacker Chinese American Christopher “C-dub” Wang.

Yu and Tsai participated in a Q&A session after the screening, with the somewhat-hyper Tsai throwing ping pong balls out to audience members who asked questions. Yu said after she met Tsai, she wanted to make sure that her film project incorporated the character C-dub that Tsai had created.

Tsai spoke about how he gets irritated when films are inconsistent in maintaining a cohesive approach towards accent or language. He cited Memoirs of a Geisha as a terrible example of how the movie starts out with characters speaking Japanese for the first five minutes, then switching to heavily accented English.

Local director Jason Karman’s short documentary “State of Yo” played prior to Yu’s feature, and the subject of his short, yo-yo champion Harvey Lowe, was also in attendance. Lowe won the world’s first yo-yo champion in 1932.

Karman said that after finding out about Lowe and reading archived press coverage about him, he felt that all news reports avoided the question of how an Asian man at that time rose to such fame and became a yo-yo teacher for children.

An afterparty took place at Kentizen Fusion restaurant, downstairs from Tinseltown. Among the attendees were Tetsuro Shigematsu, whose film Yellow Fellas premiered in Vancouver today at the festival, and Vision Vancouver mayoral candidate Gregor Robertson, who worked the crowd.

Both Ping Pong Playa and “The State of Yo” will play again on Saturday night (Nov. 8) at 9:30 p.m.

The festival ends on Sunday (Nov. 9).