Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month: Videos and Film

In a new Pew Research Center analysis based on 66 focus groups conducted in the fall of 2021, Asian American participants described navigating their own identity in a nation where the label “Asian” brings expectations about their origins, behavior and physical self.

Restaurateur, author of “Fresh off the Boat,” and host of his own television series, Eddie Huang guides us through his unique path to the American dream. Through the eyes of a first-generation Asian American, the former t-shirt hustler turned business mogul tracks the influence of his family and the cultural significance of food that led to his ultimate success.

When Jennifer Laude, a Filipina transwoman, is brutally murdered by a U.S. Marine, three women intimately invested in the case an activist attorney (Virgie Suarez), a transgender journalist (Meredith Talusan), and Jennifer's mother (Julita Nanay Laude) galvanize a political uprising, pursuing justice and taking on hardened histories of U.S. imperialism.

Swedish girl Rebecka and American girl Julia, are both adopted children from Jiangxi province, China. In the adopted families, they were taken good care of and well educated, that one of them became a designer, while another is going to be a doctor. After growing into teenagers, under the encouragement of their adopted families, they decided to look for their biological parents. Last spring, along with leaflets and bravery, these two “foreign” girls met each other in China, and started an amazing journey of searching for lost relatives.

Asian American women often feel the pressure to conform to the model minority stereotype, fight imposter syndrome, and aim to lead authentically as an "other" in the corporate world. From her personal journey identifying as a banana in college (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) through a 22 year career as a design leader in tech and now an executive coach, Tutti Taygerly moves beyond the stereotypes and shares three strategies for how to claim your leadership and succeed in workplaces not built with you in mind.

Visit any strip mall in the United States, and there’s bound to be a Vietnamese nail salon. While ubiquitous in cities across the country, few Americans know the history behind the salons and the 20 Vietnamese refugee women, who in 1975, sparked a multibillion dollar industry that supports their community to this day. Weaving powerful personal stories with insightful interviews, Nailed It, a new documentary by director Adele Free Pham, captures an unforgettable and often hilarious saga born of tragedy, charting the rise, struggle, stereotypes, and steady hold Vietnamese Americans have on today’s multiethnic $8 billion dollar nail economy.

Dolly & Adrian hear from South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander voices to explore the pros and cons of disaggregating Asian American as a statistical category.

The dominant narrative of the World War II incarceration of Japanese-Americans has been that they behaved as a “model minority,” that they cooperated without protest and proved their patriotism by enlisting in the Army. Resistance at Tule Lake, a new feature-length documentary from Third World Newsreel and directed by Japanese American filmmaker Konrad Aderer, overturns that myth by telling the long-suppressed story of Tule Lake Segregation Center. RESISTANCE AT TULE LAKE tells the long-suppressed story of 12,000 Japanese Americans who dared to resist the U.S. government's program of mass incarceration during World War II.

In the years following the Civil Rights movement and the passage of Title IX in 1972, Dr. Donnis Thompson (a headstrong African-American female coach), Patsy Mink (the first Asian-American U.S. congresswoman), and Beth McLachlin (the team captain of a rag-tag female volleyball team), battle discrimination from the halls of Washington D.C. to the dusty volleyball courts of the University of Hawaii, fighting for the rights of young women to play sports.