There are documentaries where the filmmaker is merely the vehicle for the story they're trying to tell and then there are documentaries like Bad Axe, an incredibly personal and intimate look by a filmmaker at a subject he has deep ties to. During the year of the pandemic, locked down back at home with his family in the small, sleepy town of Bad Axe, Michigan, documentarian David Siev picked up his camera to create a real-time portrait of his Asian American family during a tumultuous year.

With the lockdown in place, Siev initially sets out to make a love letter to his hometown. In front of the camera is his father, Chun Siev, a refugee who managed to escape the Cambodia Killing Fields with his mother and five siblings in 1979. Chun is hard-working, tough, and stubborn, having raised his three kids with his Mexican-American wife Rachel while running a successful restaurant. There's also Siev's opinionated and responsible older sister Jaclyn and her affable husband Michael, who has moved back in from Ann Arbor to help with the restaurant full time now that they can both work from home. And then there's Raquel, his younger sister, who is finishing her last year of University, and her boyfriend Austin, both contributing to the family business.

In many ways, Siev's Bad Axe plays out like a refined home video, with private looks at the family arguing over the business and talking about whether to speak up when politics sweep through their small town. If Siev set out to write a love letter to his town, this documentary isn't that. Instead, it's a love letter to his family and the Bad Axe that he calls home — his childhood home and his family's restaurant. From mask mandates in a conservative county where asking someone to wear a mask could lead to a physical altercation and a shouting match about personal freedoms to a small-town BLM march that reveals just how deep the white nationalist and neo-Nazi roots are up in the Upper Thumb region of Michigan, we follow the Siev family through the rollercoaster that was 2020. It is not about the experience of a town but of a family.

And in many ways, the Sievs might stand out in a town with a population of about 3,100, but while some might crave more excitement or more people, the Sievs have carved out their place in the community. But, when David releases a trailer for his unfinished film to fundraise, some in that community are infuriated. Capturing a moment during their town's Black Lives Matter protest, we see Jaclyn and Rachel standing in front of some white nationalists with their fingers on the triggers of their rifles, and the hot-tempered Jaclyn quickly gets into an argument with the racist men. It doesn't take long for the expletives and racial slurs to come out, captured all by David and his camera.

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Image via Bakers Dozen Film

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The scene, featured in the trailer, gets the attention of the locals, and soon tensions rise. The family feels the pressure of boycotters but also begins to fear for their physical safety as their youngest, Raquel, begins getting followed by men in trucks when she closes the restaurant at night. At a time when violence against Asian Americans was ramping up (and still is on the rise), living in a conservative county full of Trump supporters and neo-Nazi clusters can begin to feel suffocating. We watch firsthand as Chun teaches Jaclyn how to hide from gunfire, use a shotgun, and fend off an attacker. For a man who saw America as a safe haven after witnessing murder, torture, and starvation in Cambodia, it's a harsh reminder that you can never truly escape the violence of the world.

And, although Raquel's followers were arrested by the FBI (for quite literally being a national leader of a white supremacy organization), I can't help but wonder if the reception to the trailer led to this, what will the release of the film lead to? While Bad Axe certainly highlights the highs and lows of a family, I do wonder if David considered the full repercussions of his actions when he picked up his camera. He might now safely be back in New York, but his two sisters are now running the family business full time.

The film, for its part, is touching and heartfelt. As an Asian American myself who was raised in restaurants and worked in my family's restaurant, the woes of being in food service are painfully familiar. As are Jaclyn's own burdens of responsibility and the pressures put on Raquel to nail down her career path mere moments after graduating from university via Zoom. These moments hit as hard as when Jaclyn and Chun reflect how much the other is like Chun's mother, affectionately called Ma, the matriarch who helped raise the kids when Chun and Rachel had to work. The ties that bind this family are strong, for better and for worse.

When it comes to stories about the American Dream, the pendulum often swings from one extreme to the other. It's either the goal of all those coming to America for a fresh start or the lie fed to hopeful fools meant to keep them in the rat race, but the truth is more complicated. In many ways, Chun has achieved the American Dream. He escaped the horrors of genocide, fell in love, created a beautiful family, and owns a successful business. He went from struggling to pay the bills to enjoying the fruits of his labor. But, the flip side is, in the charged political atmosphere of 2020, he has to arm himself and wait in his truck to make sure his daughter isn't hurt while driving home from work by his neighbors.

With as much as Bad Axe presents, it's not offering solutions, and that's fine. It's asking a lot for a director's feature debut to find answers for things like PTSD, systemic racism, pandemics, and political strife. There is no simple solution. All Bad Axe offers is a portrait of an American family coming together in a time of conflict and what they can overcome when they stick together, and sometimes that's enough.

Rating: A