7:30pm Wednesday, April 5, 2023
137 Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst
Bad Axe
(David Siev, 2022, USA, 100 min)
This award-winning documentary brings us inside the lives of an Asian American family living in a rural Michigan community as they fight to keep their American dream alive. As owners of a local prominent restaurant, they reckon with a deadly global pandemic, racial tensions, and generational scars from Cambodia’s “killing fields.” A love letter to a family, a hometown, and a country stumbling toward fulfilling its great promise, perhaps no other image captures the present cultural moment as profoundly as Bad Axe, with its intimate story told with courage, honesty, and care.
Film Screening
followed by
Discussion and Q&A with
David Siev
(Director/Producer/Cinematographer)
and
Rosie Walunas
(Editor/UMass Alum)
Free and open to the public.
David Siev
(Director/Producer/Cinematographer)
After graduating from the University of Michigan, David left his small Midwest town of Bad Axe, MI for Los Angeles. He landed a home at Jeff Tremaine’s production company, Gorilla Flicks, where he spent several years finessing the art of guerrilla filmmaking. As a jack-of-all-trades filmmaker, David holds producing, camera, and consulting credits on everything from hidden-camera blockbuster comedies like BAD TRIP (Netflix) to rock and roll biopics such as THE DIRT (Netflix). David first made waves in the Asian American festival circuit with the debut of his award-winning short film, YEAR ZERO. The film would go on to win Best Narrative Short awards from the DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, Vancouver Asian Film Festival, Manhattan International Film Festival, and several others. David currently lives in New York where he is now focused on writing and directing his own projects.
Rosie Walunas
(Editor/Umass Alum)
Rosie Walunas is a documentary film editor and has a passion for vérité and character-driven films. Her long-form editing work includes recently completed projects MELTDOWN IN DIXIE and AKA JANE ROE. She has also worked on numerous documentary series such as AMERICA DIVIDED, TIME: THE KALIEF BROWDER STORY, and NO PASSPORT REQUIRED with Marcus Samuelsson. Rosie also edits short documentaries such as THE MONOLITH, which premiered on Vimeo as a Staff Pick and on Short of the Week, and The Last Conversation for The New Yorker, and artist profiles for Art21. When not editing she enjoys gardening and exploring wilderness areas.
Kathy Roberts Forde
(UMass Amherst)
Kathy Roberts Forde is a Professor of Journalism and Associate Dean for Equity and Inclusion in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is co-editor and contributing author of the book Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (University of Illinois Press, 2021), which received the American Historical Association Palmegiano Book Award, the AEJMC History Division Book Award, and the American Journalism Historians Association Book Award. Kathy is a U.S. press historian with interests in the Black freedom struggle, democracy, the First Amendment, and the history of print culture. She loves doing press history research with undergraduate students, many of whom have co-authored news essays with her in the Washington Post’s Made by History section.