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In 1999, demonic rollerblading triplets armed with hockey sticks laid cross-checks on the likes of Bud Cort and Chris Rock in Kevin Smith’s Dogma . The enforcer in the blue Highlands Clamdiggers jersey? That was Kitao Sakurai , a teenage actor based in Cleveland at the time. He couldn’t have known it then, but his role in Smith’s slacker-minded religious satire offered an early glimpse of the offbeat sensibility he’d later bring to his own filmmaking — a sensibility now on full display in Street Fighter , the number-one movie in America.

Fueled by the Cleveland Cinematheque’s programming diet of Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Robert Altman, young Sakurai grew just as interested in working behind the camera. By 19, he’d dropped out of college and moved to New York to give independent filmmaking a go.…