Film Screening & Talk Back: BAD AXE

BAD AXE (101 minutes, 2022) captures a closely knit Asian-American family in a rural Michigan community, as they now fight to keep their American dream alive as owners of a local prominent restaurant in the face of a global pandemic, racial reckoning, and generational scars from the Cambodian Killing Fields.

Presented in connection with the UMMA exhibition Angkor Complex: Cultural Heritage and Post-Genocide Memory in Cambodia and organized as part of the 2024 Conference of the Midwest Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Students Union.

After leaving NYC for his rural hometown of Bad Axe, MI at the start of the pandemic, an Asian-American filmmaker documents his family’s struggles to keep their restaurant open. As fears of the virus grow, deep generational scars dating back to the Cambodian Killing Fields unearth between the family’s patriarch, Chun, and his daughter, Jaclyn. When the BLM movement takes center stage in America, the family uses their voice to speak out in their conservative community. What unfolds is a real-time portrait of 2020 through the lens of this multicultural family’s fight to keep their American dream alive in the face of a pandemic, racial reckoning, and the trauma of having survived a genocide.

Free and open to the public. No ticket required.   

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