The Festival

About us

Mandate

Celebrating Asian Heritage Month in May at Tiohtiá:ke-Mooniyang-Montréal, Festival Accès Asie is a month-long, interdisciplinary, unifying, engaging, and festive arts festival. It amplifies the voices and practices of artists from the Asian continent and its diaspora across a variety of fields, including performing arts, visual and media arts, literary arts, interdisciplinary arts, and culinary arts. We feature many local artists and present many emerging and established artists.

Through performances, exhibitions, concerts, and workshops, the Festival showcases artists from Asian communities and collaborations with artists from other communities. It builds bridges between Asian artists and the rest of society, and offers cultural mediation activities.

Rooted in values of equity, inclusion, hospitality, sharing, solidarity, artistic boldness and risk-taking, accessibility, intersectionality, and social and environmental justice, the Festival contributes to the empowerment and professional development of Asian and other minority artists. It showcases Montreal’s artistic milieu by collaborating with presenters and its maisons de la culture to broaden access to the arts.

Established in 1995, Festival Accès Asie is Canada’s longest-running Asian heritage festival. To date, we have presented the works of over 1,000 artists of Asian origin from all over Asia, including East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East.

In addition to its May activities, the FAA organizes: 

1) Confronting Racism Together, an ongoing series of artistic events as part of Montreal’s Action Week Against Racism in March, 2) the nomadic festival Fleur de lys, Fleur de thé, which presents the work of Asian-Canadian artists in Quebec’s regions throughout the summer, and 3) a number of activities focusing on the work of Asian artists throughout the year in partnership with other presenters.

Our Festival is firmly committed to eco-responsibility. We see it as our responsibility to contribute to preserving our living environment and  raising the awareness of this cause with our audiences. Our actions include focusing on sustainable mobility, reducing our carbon footprint, reducing waste production and management, raising awareness and education, and evaluating our progress.