DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

When COVID-19 made its first wave throughout the United States in March of 2020, I decided to leave New York City for my rural hometown of Bad Axe, MI, to be with my family. With many restaurants facing dire financial struggles across the country, my parents’ family-owned restaurant was no exception.

The story of Bad Axe begins long before the start of the pandemic and my return to Bad Axe. My mother, Rachel, is a Mexican-American

woman who spent her early years working day in and day out as a waitress at various restaurants in Metro-Detroit. On the other hand, my 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 Chun stumbled into, and the rest is history. As a young, married couple with no college education, no money, but all ambition, they started a family and opened up a donut shop and tae kwon do school to get by.

In 1998, my parents decided to move our family from the outskirts of Detroit to build a new donut shop in a small, quaint town that would become our home for years to come: Bad Axe, Michigan. My parents struggled for years to make ends meet with their new donut shop, Baker’s Dozen. They shortly after decided to transition the donut shop into a family restaurant named Rachel’s, but to their dismay, things didn’t get much better. My siblings and I learned the value of hard work and the stresses of wondering if we would lose our house at a very young age. I remember a deep fear that the bank would one day come and take all of our personal belongings out of our home if my parents couldn’t pay the bills. And as much concern that I felt as a kid, my oldest sister, Jaclyn, bore most of the weight to do something about it.

Jaclyn never got to have a normal childhood that most kids have growing up. At the age of 11, She began working at the restaurant full-time and has not stopped since. It wasn’t until after she graduated from the University of Michigan and got a corporate job that things began to take a turn for our family. Jaclyn invested her salary from her new white-collar job back into the restaurant. We remodeled, recharged, and reinvented what our small, family restaurant could be in the town of Bad Axe.

Bad Axe is what I’d describe as your typical, small Midwestern town. There are two main stoplights, miles of cornfields, not a whole lot of diversity, and then us. I was one of four people of color in my school. As an adolescent, I’ve been called every racial slur in the book and had difficulty coming to terms with my own racial identity. I’ve always felt like an outsider to my community in many ways. It wasn’t until I left Michigan and moved out to Los Angeles that I began to ask questions and learned to embrace my identity as a Cambodian-Mexican American. I started learning more about my dad’s trauma of surviving genocide and even wrote and directed my first film, Year Zero, about his fight for survival in Cambodia. This experience made me realize how far my parents had come to build their own American Dream.

Flash forward to March 2020. The pandemic hit New York City. My girlfriend and I packed up our bags and left our two-bedroom apartment in Queens to make our way back home to Bad Axe. My siblings, who had all lived in the bustling city of Ann Arbor, MI, did the same. We

decided it was best to all be together during this uncertain time. Having just lost my job, I made the best use of my time and began filming life as it was. With everyone living under the same roof again, my only intention at the time was to film a time capsule that our family could look back on. So I filmed every day that year, capturing the mixed emotions we felt as we lived through a year of fear, anger, joy, and hope.

My father’s PTSD resurfaced due to the anxieties in dealing with the uncertainties of a global pandemic. For him, it brought back the hauntings of the collapsing Cambodia in 1975. Being home again, Jaclyn and I had to reckon with the suppressed resentment we had for our hometown since the 2016 election. We were quickly made aware that speaking up in support of the Black Lives Matter movement meant putting our family’s business at stake. As children, we were raised to stand up for what we believe in, but suddenly living in Bad Axe, we were reminded that no matter how much we thought we fit in, many of those around us were eager to turn their backs on us if we made it known that our viewpoints differed from them.

In November of 2020, the world seemed to start getting back to whatever “normal” was, with COVID restrictions lifted and the passing of a divided election. With that, I headed back to NYC to begin putting the pieces together of everything I had filmed. Shortly after, I released a trailer for the film to start a crowdfunding campaign to help kick off the feature-length documentary I had in mind. While I did expect some backlash, my family and I were unprepared for the depth that people would go to attack our family on a personal level. Don’t get me wrong, a large majority of our community was incredibly supportive and encouraged us to share our story. However, the wounds from the negative bunch dug deep and seemed to bring to life every fear we ever had about speaking up. Comments such as “go back to Cambodia” or “we’re no longer supporting your restaurant” were hurled at us on social media, on top of threatening phone calls and hate mail from white nationalists. There was a point when my parents sat me down and tried to convince me that sharing our story was no longer worth it if it meant jeopardizing our family’s business and, more importantly, our safety. However, as time went on, I convinced my family that the fear that we had was the very reason that our voices needed to be heard. By sharing our experiences, we could show that our family’s story transcends politics, that at its core, this film is a story of what it means to be American today.

In the edit and through hours of splicing together footage, I realized I had captured a portrait of American history. Through a character-driven, cinema verite approach, I wanted to connect themes of transgenerational trauma, racial identity, and what the modern-day American Dream truly is. The fear of losing that dream my parents had worked so hard to build affected us as our family (and country) plunged into crisis; however, it also brought us all closer together as a family, community, and Americans. As a first-time documentary filmmaker, I leaned heavily into my narrative storytelling style and drew inspiration from both recent narrative and verite documentary films such as Minari and Minding the Gap. Finally, after cutting down 300 hours of footage, I found myself with a film that I hope will be passed down for generations to come.

The story of Bad Axe needs to be told because I believe it encompasses all that it means to be American. While we may be different from many of those living in our hometown through the color of our skin, the history of our family, and the views we may have, we are more alike than we are different. I love the town of Bad Axe because it’s given our family everything. Despite all the adversity we may have faced, it has ultimately shaped me into the person I am today.

-David Siev