Asian American Stories of Resilience and Beyond

A Filipino-American daughter digitally records and visually captures the experience of being physically distanced from her sick father, who has been isolated in his nursing facility during the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

As a young refugee, Chanthon Bun joined a gang; he was convicted of second-degree robbery at 19 and lost legal protection to live in the U.S. After two decades in prison, Bun was released but not into the custody of ICE by a strange twist of luck. But he knows he must tread carefully as he attempts to legally reintegrate - if ICE were to locate him, he would be detained and slated for deportation.

Two Filipinx cousins grapple with what remains of their dreams, after the loss of one father during the pandemic. Combining interviews, archival and verité, the film explores the tension between losing a parent in a highly Catholic Filipino community, the foreverness of childhood, and the possibilities of growing deeper in faith through grief while in the most conservative county in North Florida.

A fourth-generation Chinese American, filmmaker Kimberlee Bassford explores her family’s relationship to Honolulu's Chinatown. She also examines the parallels between the COVID-19 pandemic and the 1899-1900 bubonic plague in Hawai‘i, highlighting the ways the two public health crises transformed the iconic neighborhood then and now.

FedEx operates one of its largest hubs in Indianapolis, where over 80% of employees are South Asians/Punjabi. In 2021, a former worker killed eight, leaving the Sikh community grieving. When the investigations declare the mass shooting not a hate crime, many question the findings. The film is the story of a community responding to an act of violence, and their right to be safe and treated equally.

After the closure of their mother’s nail salon at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a queer filmmaker works with their mother to recover and articulate the legacy of the salon for their refugee family.

In 2020, anti-Asian hate crimes experienced an exponential rise amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and the murder of George Floyd sparked a racial reckoning over police violence. A biracial Black-Indonesian family in Minneapolis open up about how they moved through the chaos; each member reveals personal experiences never shared before, and navigate through the difficult issues that have haunted them.