Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month: Videos and Film

This unique series of mini-docs presented by Asian American Documentary Network offers a unique perspective of Asian Americans on the COVID-19 pandemic, adopting stories that are still largely invisible. By leaning into their strengths as documentarians of the Asian diaspora, the filmmakers offer perspectives that disrupt mainstream narratives about Asian communities.

Emma Barnett meets with the acclaimed artist and dissident Ai Weiwei to talk about his detention in China, his fight for human rights and the art of protest.

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.

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.

Palo Alto sits in the heart of Silicon Valley, just a few miles away from tech giants such as Google and Facebook, and home to Stanford University. Some of the wealthiest and smartest people in the world call this Bay Area city home, but it’s also home to a sobering statistic. In recent years, there have been two high school suicide clusters. The first was between 2009-2010, when five current and former students took their own lives. Five years later, during the 2014/2015 school year, four more students died by suicide. In the following years, several recent graduates lost their lives to suicide. Countless others have received both inpatient and outpatient care for treatment of stress, anxiety, and depression.

Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto stops by the kitchen for a showdown. Chef Morimoto makes a traditional Deep-Fried Pork Cutlet Tonkatsu and his house Ramen, while Ming counters with a vegetarian version of Portobello Tonkatsu atop a House Rice.

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.

Asian Americans is a five-hour film series that will chronicle the contributions, and challenges of Asian Americans, the fastest-growing ethnic group in America.

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.

A multigenerational portrait of the nearly 5,000 Punjabi men who settled in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, just north of the Mexican border, a century ago. Seeking to earn enough money to return to their homes in India, they instead encountered not just abysmal wages and working conditions, but also anti-miscegenation and anti-immigration laws that prevented Punjabi women from joining them in the U.S.

When he was a child, George Takei and his family were forced into an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, as a "security" measure during World War II. 70 years later, Takei looks back at how the camp shaped his surprising, personal definition of patriotism and democracy.