100 min | NR | November 18, 2022 | IFC Films
A Cambodian-Mexican-American family runs a restaurant in rural Michigan, and 2020 arrives to test whether the place and the family survive it. The youngest son points a camera at his own parents and refuses to look away. The result is the rare documentary that earns its tears.
Bad Axe follows the Siev family as they fight to keep their restaurant open in small-town Michigan during the first year of the pandemic. The surface is a small-business survival story. The real subject is inherited trauma and the cost of becoming American. Chun Siev escaped the Cambodian genocide as a child and built a new life on relentless work and silence about the past. The film tracks what happens when that silence collides with his daughters, COVID lockdowns, and a town that suddenly turns on people who look like them.
Chun Siev anchors the film as a father who measures love in hours worked and demands the same from his children. He is hard and exacting, and the camera catches the moments where the hardness cracks. Rachel and Jaclyn Siev run the restaurant and argue with their father about masks, money, and the future, and their frustration carries the weight of years. The standout sequences come when Chun finally describes the Killing Fields out loud, and Raquel Siev pushes him to keep talking. These are not performances. These are people letting a son film the things families usually bury.
David Siev directs and writes the film about his own parents and sisters, and the proximity becomes the technique. He shoots from inside the kitchen and the dinner table, close enough that the frame fills with faces and steam and shouting. The handheld camera stays in the room during the worst fights instead of cutting away to safety. Siev intercuts grainy home-video footage of his childhood with the present-day crisis, and the juxtaposition turns the restaurant into a record of three generations. When a Black Lives Matter protest divides the town, he keeps the camera on his sisters as the threats arrive, and the editing lets the fear sit without commentary.
The film works because Siev refuses the easy version of this story. He does not flatter his father or sand down the family conflicts into a tidy reconciliation. He films a man who survived one genocide and now watches his children face a smaller American cruelty, and he lets the contradiction stand. Bad Axe is about what one generation carries so the next does not have to, and about the parts that get passed down anyway. The intimacy is the argument, and the argument lands.