BAD AXE

After leaving NYC for his rural hometown of Bad Axe, Michigan, at the start of the pandemic, Asian American filmmaker David Siev documents his family's struggles to keep their restaurant afloat. Like many small businesses facing dire financial struggles across the country, David’s parents' family-owned restaurant was no exception. Bad Axe, says David, is your typical, small Midwestern town with “two main stoplights, miles of cornfields, not a whole lot of diversity, and then us”. His mother, Rachel, is Mexican American. His father, Chun, is a Cambodian refugee who escaped the genocide of the Killing Fields in 1979 with his mother and five siblings. The two met in 1986 while Rachel was working at a Chinese restaurant. As fears of the virus grow, deep generational scars dating back to Cambodia’s bloody “killing fields” come to the fore, straining the relationship between Chun, and his daughter, Jaclyn. When the BLM movement takes center stage in America, the family uses its collective voice to speak out in their conservative community. What unfolds is a real-time portrait of 2020 through the lens of one multicultural family’s fight stay in business, stay involved, and stay alive.