BEDMATES: Anna Karin Cheung spends quality time with the men she thinks impregnated her in 'The People I've Slept With.'

ARE INDIE film producers actually calling for more and more and yet ever more unplanned-pregnancy movies? More importantly, are audiences? The People I've Slept With (showing March 20, 4:45pm)—one of the salient features at the Asian American Film Festival, coming to Camera 12 in San Jose for the weekend—is produced by 408 Films, a consortium of investors based in Silicon Valley.

Apparently, Juno whetted their appetites. The People I've Slept With has a spicy title to conceal a pitiless bait-and-switch trick. Angela (Anna Karin Cheung) has a problem, and it's not that she's gotta have it, but rather that she's gestating "Tiny," as she deems the child-not-a-choice in her belly. And she's been so eager in the beaver that she can't remember who impregnated her.

Three walking stereotypes are among the possible honorees: Long Duk Dongish nerd, freaky-deaky white boy and Mr. Asian Perfect. At times, local director Quentin Lee recalls his past as a polymorphously perverse director (Shopping for Fangs). The result is TV-like material that's slower in pace yet only slightly more scandalous in material. But not by much; Two and a Half Men is better for raunch, and Sex and the City for after-raunch dish.

The twin morals: first, babies are the greatest, planned or unplanned, they really firm up your life. Second, people with epicanthic folds like to have crazy sex too. As for the first, we get it rather a lot. As for the latter: I'm sorry, Annabel Chong, you labored in vain.

Aoki (March 30, 3pm) has a fascinating subject: Richard Aoki was an Asian American member of the Black Panthers, an old-time battler who lived one street down from Huey Newton in west Oakland. Radicalized by his family's internment at Topaz Camp, Aoki grew into a scrapper and a military vet; defying the model-minority stereotype, he was an ardent Communist, the kind that lionized the older Kim Il-sung of Korea.

I'm looking forward to an encounter with Diane Fujino's biography of the man, because Aoki is so roughly assembled it's nearly unwatchable. News of Aoki's death last year at the beginning of the film is seemingly exculpatory to the state of this film. Still, directors Ben Wang and Mike Cheng could really build on this research and come up with something like A People's History of Oakland someday.

State of Aloha (March 21, 2:15pm) is your typical of-two-minds film-watching experience. On the one hand, they should show it on every Honolulu-bound jet. On the other hand, the repetitious, too much heat, not enough light historicizing would make one claw at the emergency exit hatch. Impressionism doesn't hit one in the chest as hard as it might in today's news world where everything that bleeds leads. More affecting is the careful spelling out of that litany of tremendous injustice, imperialism and racism: the measured studying of the plundering of a paradise by greedy, golf-course-building ravagers. The facts have more intellectual effect and, ultimately, punch.

You don't have to be Indonesian to understand The Forbidden Door (March 21; 7pm) but it helps: this studiously Lynchian thriller about a deranged artist probably benefits from more code reading. I liked its malicious beginning: a glossy gallery full of Las Vegasy sculptures and a rich swine being groomed to buy while drawling that the sales pitch was "cat shit" anyway.

From there come hints of impotence, some secret multiple abortion trauma (again with the pregnancy) and a Bluebeard-like babe with a locked chamber and a secret club with Room 42651378 in it, where forbidden viewing is on tap for the privileged: closed-circuit symbolist dom-porn of the stripe of Daniel Clowes' Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron.

Director Joko Anwar's rephrase of Jakarta as a bland Yankee consumer paradise may be the opening shot of a new wave of I-horror, to go with J-horror and K-horror. This may be the plot all along (more sense to that plot than the one that's onscreen).

The Message (March 21, 9pm), a very slick, torture-scene-laden find-the-mole game in the dungeon of the puppet government of Taiwan during World War II, is phrased through the lens of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. This late in the game, it's nice to see someone doing a Peter Lorre imitation (in the form of the giggling evil-acupuncturist "Mr. Six"), yet one feels that learning about this part of World War II via this movie is like trying to study Nazism by watching Inglourious Basterds.

I must be getting more mainstream, because Miwa Nishikawa's mysteriousness in Dear Doctor (March 20, noon) impressed me more than any of the above. In an unusually lush remote corner of rural Japan, the beloved local physician vanishes. His own secret becomes apparent through investigation. In this green, neglected corner of Japan, young people leave to get work, elders are neglected by the system and the physician is looked at as a local deity.

Dear Doctor has the believability of a true story; the limits of ordinary goodwill are clear in this Bill Forsyth–like drama. A highlight is Kimiko Yo as the calm, tough nurse and moral center; an edge of stress in her performance keep the movie from going feel-good, although the ending is rather sweet. The superb compositions and visual storytelling take the slickness out of what could have been a soap opera.

THE ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL screens this weekend at Camera 12 in San Jose. The opening reception takes place Friday (March 19) at 9pm at the San Jose Museum of Art, following a screening of AU REVOIR TAIPEI at 7pm at Camera 12.