Celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Month with these five extraordinary titles that amplify AAPI voices both behind and in front of the camera.
Happy Cleaners
The film is a heartfelt portrait of a hard-working Korean immigrant family in Flushing, Queens family striving to keep their dry cleaning business afloat amidst changing cultural values. Julian Kim and Peter S. Lee team up to direct a gentle drama in the vein of Minari that is suitable for immigration studies programming.
Happy Cleaners is simply an enjoyable and quietly inspirational portrait of the modern Korean diaspora in America.
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First Vote
Director Yi Chen delivers a significant examination on voter rights, racial justice, and immigration in his fascinating documentary about Chinese American electoral organizing in the key swing states of North Carolina and Ohio from the presidential election of 2016 to the 2018 midterms. Chen's political and social issues documentary is a great selection for political science majors and collections focused on racial politics.
Filmmaker Yi Chen introduces us to four individuals in election battleground states Ohio and North Carolina, and we soon see a microcosm in one demographic community of the chasm in political perception that has imperiled the nation.
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Jeronimo
From Korean-American filmmaker Joseph Juhn, Jeronimo explores the life of a Korean man who joins the Cuban revolution and crosses paths with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, before turning to his Korean roots and identity. Jeronimo is the perfect option for political and history majors/shelves, especially those with an interest in Cuban history.
Juhn does a fine job personalizing the material, relating Jeronimo's saga with the search for identity and homeland that haunts Korean émigrés (said to number eight million worldwide) from the divided peninsula to this day.
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Lucky Grandma
A wild dramedy directed by Sasie Sealy about an ornery, chain-smoking Chinese grandma who hedges all her bets at a casino and finds herself in the middle of a gang war. Lucky Grandma appeals to those interested in programming foreign language films, specifically Mandarin or Cantonese-language ones.
Set almost entirely within the ethnic enclave of New York City's Chinatown, (there is very little English conversation; almost everything is spoken in Cantonese and Mandarin) filmmaker Sasie Sealy's comedy-thriller has the virtually unheard-of notion to place an elderly Asian female front and center as the lead character.
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Mother
An incredibly moving and intimate documentary set in a small village in Thailand that focuses on a woman who works in a care center for Europeans with Alzheimer's. Mother is a suitable option for medical shelves, particularly those who specialize in elderly care.
The potentially downbeat subject matter of Mother might make some potential viewers nervous, but it proves a deeply humane, life-affirming experience
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