Jaclyn confronting counter-protestors in Bad Axe (IFC FIlms)

Bad Axe, the debut of David Siev, stars his family, and is one of the most surprising films of the year. Potential viewers might wonder why they should watch a documentary about a random family that owns a restaurant in a Michigan small town, filmed two years ago. Yes, it covers the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, so do we really need all that to be examined again? Yes, as it turns out. As the documentary goes on, you realize this family, led by tough as nails family patriarch and Cambodian immigrant Chun Siev, is something special, and the family’s experience of these recent pivotal events sheds light on what America is, and what it can be, in a unique way.

Chun was a teenager in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge genocide. He was tortured and witnessed numerous killings, narrowly escaped to America, and settled in the small, conservative, and mostly White town of Bad Axe, Michigan. He worked as a tae kwon do instructor, where he met his future wife, Rachel, a Mexican immigrant. They opened a small donut shop and started a family. The donut shop evolved into a successful restaurant called Rachel’s, and their kids all worked in the family business.

It’s a quintessential American success story, and Chun is as hardworking as any of the Trump supporters in his area. He even owns a massive arsenal of guns, which he trains his family to use. Yet because of his ethnicity, and his support of basic Covid measures in the restaurant, like wearing a mask (and his support of Black Lives Matter protests), his family is targeted by local reactionaries. When the documentary trailer of the film-in-the-making posts on Facebook, it receives a hostile reaction from some local right-wingers, who dismiss the film project and the family as stereotypical liberals. Some of the family’s views are liberal, but they are much more than that, and they can’t be written off as typical woke elitists at all.

Chun supports Covid safety protocols because he knows how precious and fragile life is—he witnessed so much death in the Cambodian genocide and is so grateful for the family life he built in America that he supports mask wearing. He even develops some homemade masks (which his kids say aren’t safe enough). He shut down his restaurant, relying on takeout orders, and once businesses opened up in fall 2020, he made it a policy that customers wear masks. As a result, there are tense scenes of customers barging into the restaurant and refusing to comply, causing wild confrontations that result in a call to the police.

But even the police are no guarantee of law and order in Bad Axe. As footage of the local BLM protests highlight, the police force is very much against BLM and invoke the All Lives Matter slogan, as well as defend the counter-protesters, who carry rifles and wear combat-masks while the local police stand shoulder to shoulder with them. Chun’s eldest daughter, Jaclyn, gets in their faces, calling them cowards—despite being worried that doing so will spark a boycott of her family’s restaurant. Still, she does what she thinks is right, and her father supports her.

Along with Chun, Jaclyn is the other standout here. She is tough and hardheaded, like her father, and their similarity results in sometimes vicious clashes between them. They brutally swear at each other in several scenes, but it’s clear that their anger is caused by how much they both love each other and want what’s best for the family. Jaclyn lives in the college town Ann Arbor, has a corporate job there, and lives with her husband, but they come to Bad Axe every weekend to help with the family restaurant. As the pandemic rages, they spend more time in the eatery so that Chun and Rachel can isolate at home. When Chun’s work ethic drives him to show up to work, Jaclyn rages at him for putting his life at risk—but only because she cares about him.

David Siev is a young filmmaker, and he has achieved something remarkable with this project, which points out how complex it is to be an American, and how the divide between right and left is so arbitrary and inadequate. Immigrants are often pandered to in bromides about the American Dream, but Bad Axe expresses this in an authentic and undeniable way.