Slant 9: Bold Asian American Images, Aurora Picture Show’s ninth annual film festival, breaks a few stereotypes with 11 quirky shorts. There’s Waiting for a Train, Oscar Bucher’s hybrid documentary about Tokyo cowboy musician Toshio Hirano; Machine With Wishbone, Randall Okita’s delightful live-action-but-looks-like-stop-motion film; Survivors, Soham Mehta’s 13-minute zombie movie; and The Others, Aram Siu Wai Collier’s wacky tribute to — who’d have guessed — Lou Diamond Phillips.

Slant’s founder/curator is Houston-born Melissa Hung, a onetime Houston Press staff writer who now lives in San Francisco, where she’s the blog editor of the Asian-American magazine Hyphen. “The advantage to being a small film festival is that we only show the best work,” Hung emailed us from San Francisco. “We show Asian American films, not films from Asia. This is an important distinction, because we’re not showing foreign films. We’re showing homegrown, stereotype-smashing art.” 7 p.m. Glassell School of Art, 5101 Montrose. For information, call 713-868-2101 or visit www.aurorapictureshow.org. Free to $6. Tickets must be purchased online.

Sat., May 30, 7 p.m., 2009

This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2009.

D.L. Groover has contributed to countless reputable publications including the Houston Press since 2003. His theater criticism has earned him a national award from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia...