Our take
Bad Axe is an intimate documentary that follows the Sievs, a tight-knit family that runs a restaurant in the city of Bad Axe, Michigan. When the rise of COVID restrictions and racist hate groups put their business at risk, the Sievs try to hold on to each other while also carefully, in their own way, fighting back.
Mostly shot in the unforgettable year that is 2020, Bad Axe captures the fraught intensity and existential panic we all spiraled into during the global pandemic. It’s a charged film, but underneath all that buzz is a story about a family with its own tensions and histories and contradictions to deal with. Bad Axe is at once simple and complex, and like family, you just kind of love it, flaws and all.
The story
A real-time portrait of 2020 unfolds as an Asian-American family in Trump’s rural America fights to keep their restaurant and American dream alive in the face of a pandemic, Neo-Nazis, and generational scars from the Cambodian Killing Fields.
Elsewhere
"The most essential film yet made about this era is David Siev’s moving and triumphant Bad Axe."
— Brian Tallerico
The details
Aswang
Alyx Ayn Arumpac
This Is Not a Film
Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb
On the Record
Amy Ziering & Kirby Dick
There Are No Fakes
Jamie Kastner
The Other Dream Team
Marius A. Markevicius & Marius Markevicius
Undefeated
Daniel Lindsay & T. J. Martin
Prophet’s Prey
Amy J. Berg
To Kill a Tiger
Nisha Pahuja
Who picked it
Renee Cuisia is the lead curator at A Good Movie to Watch. In her spare time, she likes to watch K-dramas and analyze them to death. She's also seen You've Got Mail one too many times but is still convinced it's one of the greatest films out there.
