Virginia Film Festival

Audience Award Winner, SXSW 

At the start of the 2020 pandemic, documentarian David Siev left his life in New York City to return to his small conservative hometown of Bad Axe, Michigan, and spend the quarantine helping his struggling parents with their prominent local restaurant. With pandemic fears rising alongside racial tensions, the generational scars of surviving Cambodia’s “killing fields” begin to haunt David’s father as he fears the consequences of living as a Cambodian family in a predominantly Trump-supporting town. As the Black Lives Matter movement takes center stage in America, the family organizes a BLM protest in their conservative town, using their collective voice to speak out in their conservative community. What begins as a love letter to his hometown morphs into a testament to the power of putting family above all else.

Introduction by Shilpa Davé (UVA)