The world premiere of played on Saturday night at the Castro Theatre and the house was packed.

One of the themes running through the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival last year was about how there weren't enough Asian-American men in movies. Clearly things have not improved since out of the three movies we saw over the weekend, two of them featured the same dude (Ken Leung) as the male lead (and the third one was a Japanese anime).

Shanghai Kiss is the story of a struggling 28 year-old Asian-American actor (the perspicacious Ken Leung) in L.A. who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a 16 year-old girl (played by Hayden Panettiere of ABC's "Heroes"). He's forced to confront both his identity crisis and his troubled relationship with his father when he inherits a house in Shanghai where he meets the lovely Kelly Hu (who also stars in an ABC series, "In Case of Emergency" and who is in another SFIAAFF film this year too).

After the jump: donkeys in Compton or taking the bus in LA? And the director's poignant story about his father.

Shanghai Kiss