Filmmaker Emmy Lam and the "Princess of Salsa"

Multicultural Entertainment Marketing Series: Perils & Rewards of the "Ethnic Niche" in the Entertainment Industry (Part 2 of 4)

By Yayoi Lena Winfrey, AAV Contributing Editor

Filmmaker Emmy Lam
The Do-It-Yourself Approach

While Emmy Lam was not born in America, she considers L.A. her home. The "twenty-something" Chinese filmmaker from Hong Kong attended Hawai'i Pacific University, where she discovered salsa.

"I met some Asians and they started speaking Portuguese and it was so amazing," says Lam about her initial encounter with Latin culture. "There are a lot of Asians in Latin America."

Put in charge of entertainment for the school banquet, Lam chose salsa dancing.

"It was so beautiful," says Emmy, who "heard...Latin beats...and fell in love."

She and her girlfriends went on to frequent a salsa nightclub one summer, inspiring her "crazy idea" to create the Danza Latina dance club at her college.

Since then, "salsa is always within me," gushes Emmy, who now teaches it. "I just love it so much."

After graduation, Lam pursued an entertainment career in L.A. where "I went to lots of film festivals and I realized everybody who has an idea can be a filmmaker," she giggles. "Where I come from...you can't be an indy filmmaker. In L.A., you have a camera, you have an idea, you can be a filmmaker."

While attending a salsa congress last year, Lam met Josie Neglia, an Italian Canadian born and raised in Toronto. The dancer would become the subject of Lam’s documentary film, The Princess of Salsa, which Lam now privately screens while seeking a television distribution deal.

With a marketing MBA degree, Lam says that even before production she was conscious of her target market, the "special interest group" it would be pegged for in the film industry. As a creative artist, Lam understands that "it's a must to promote. I'm not only a filmmaker, but I'm able to package my product to the market out there."

Indeed, she has undertaken to push the film forcefully and personally. Besides making posters and postcards to pass out "everywhere", she again frequents salsa clubs, conducts email outreach, and attends networking events. She has also leveraged her promotional web site into fruitful partnerships and sponsorships with related businesses. She has exchanged a site advertisement for a club sponsoring weekly salsa events for promoting her film in their physical venue.

Her post-production crew includes a publicity writer who updates the web site following every screening, writes releases, and cultivates media contacts. Lam has had interviews with Sabor Magazine, a local Chinese newspaper, and OKLA, a Latin magazine.

And because she loves to travel, Lam constantly enters the film in and accompanies it to festivals. Recently, the trailer was selected as one of ten finalists for the Latino Entertainment Media Institution's Trailer Festival competition.

Some artists might balk at Lam’s approach, which requires organized strategy and a certain savvy and interest in business. She admits that "Where I'm from, art was not really...important. There was more focus on business. They don’t see art as making money."

But the approach also requires enormous energy and devotion, which Lam seems to draw from her love of the subject and from within.

"Inside me I have that passion," she says the filmmaker, who is living her dream as – the words of her publicist’s slogan – "a Chinese woman with a Latin soul."