There used to be more ways for movies to make it to the United States. Bollywood movies still manage to travel an alternate distribution circuit, occasionally grossing millions of dollars while playing in theaters most Anglo audiences have never heard of. Before that, there was the Chinese circuit.

Chinese distributors used to own theaters in every state in the union, importing and exhibiting Hong Kong and Taiwanese films for immigrant audiences. They raked in the bucks throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but the theaters started to die out in the 1990s,and one of the last to go was New York’s Music Palace, on the corner of Hester and Bowery.

The music palace spent its last decade slowly falling apart, frequented by a few loyal Chinese customers and some curious Anglos. I was one of the latter, heading down every week to take in a double feature of the latest movies from Hong Kong: sometimes trash, sometimes treasure. When the Music Palace finally closed its doors, a group of us were hit with the same terrible thought: What now?

Would New York be overrun with serious, Asian art-house films? How would the latest action flicks, horror movies, and stupid comedies make it to our shores? No distributor was going to take a chance on movies that didn’t fit into the art house. We felt our only choice was to do it ourselves.

Twelve of us sat around a table at a teahouse and swore to pool our money and bring mainstream Asian movies to American screens. The next time we met, we brought our checkbooks and only five of us bothered to show up. None of us had any film festival experience, none of us had worked in the film industry and none of us knew what we were doing. It wasn’t pretty.

This year, the landscape has changed. In the early days no one else wanted the movies we showed: They were too lowbrow. These days, Asian movies are hot, and we find ourselves competing with distributors and prestigious festivals over a shrinking pool of films. The good thing is that with 12 film industries in Asia, it’s easy to skim the cream and have plenty of movies for everyone. But each year there are more competitors, and we have to dig deeper and search harder for the movies in our lineup.

Most people think foreign movies are somehow more intellectual, or more artsy than Hollywood product, and for four years we’ve tried to dispel that notion. Asian movies can be just as deliciously trashy, if not more so, than their American counterparts. If the Music Palace still existed, it would have just finished a run of the Hong Kong movie “Slim Till Dead,” about a serial killer who abducts supermodels and forces them to diet until they die. Now that’s a movie that anyone, in any country, can get behind.

Until July 2 at Anthology Film Archives & Imaginasian (212-868-4444).