WASHINGTON - Early on in David Siev’s documentary “Bad Axe,” which tells the story of his Mexican-Cambodian-American family’s struggle to keep their restaurant afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic, he films his father chopping wood on a chilly day.
“Why are you filming everything David?” Chun Siev asks his son.
“I just think it’s an important time in history right now. I just want to document everything,” David says from behind the camera.
Siev, a filmmaker in New York City, headed back to his hometown of Bad Axe, Michigan, at the start of the pandemic and kept his camera rolling. He didn’t plan to make a documentary, but he ended up creating a film now being heralded as one of the best depictions yet of those deadly and transformative months of 2020.
Critic Brian Tallerico for RogerEbert.com called it “the most essential film yet made about this era.” The film has a 100% audience score on RottenTomatoes.com and won the Audience Award at the South by Southwest film festival. In December, it was one of 15 films shortlisted for an Oscar in the documentary feature category.
“Bad Axe’ is a celebration of David’s tight-knit and multi-racial family, exploring the generational tension between fighting for what’s right and trying to fit in — and whether either approach can conquer racism and hate.
While COVID forces Rachel’s Bar & Grill to close its doors and transform its business — Chun at one point says the virus scares him more than the Khmer Rouge did when he was a teenager — it’s not the only challenge the family faces in the film.
Politics and bigotry pose an equally menacing threat to the family and its restaurant, located in a rural community with two stop lights, a Walmart, and Trump 2020 flags seemingly everywhere.
The Black Lives Matter protests that swept the country in June 2020, after police in Minneapolis killed George Floyd, eventually reach Bad Axe, and two of David’s sisters — Jaclyn and Raquel — decide they can’t stay quiet.
They change the restaurant’s Facebook profile picture to a black square, and prepare signs to attend a protest downtown. It’s a stark break from the family way. Jaclyn says her parents’ recipe for success in small-town America has been “get your work done, don’t speak up too loud.”
Chun survived Cambodia’s killing fields in the 1970s and moved to America as a teenager. He and Rachel met while working at a restaurant, and fell in love when she took his taekwondo classes. They opened a donut shop in Bad Axe and raised four children in a two-bedroom house, before eventually building the restaurant and a new house.
When Rachel is weighing whether to join her children at the BLM protest, Chun issues an ominous warning.
“Why all of a sudden you want to stick your head out…and be the, might be, the target?” he asks his wife.
She joins anyway. At the protest, Jaclyn screams at a trio of masked young men who show up at the protest heavily armed. Talking about the police looking on, she asks, “Who are they worried about inciting violence, the protesters or the f—ing little bitches here.”
Raquel accuses one of the masked men of calling her a “gook,” and she and Jaclyn mock them for pronouncing the slur wrong. After the protest, the family obsession briefly turns to identifying the masked “nazis.”
But then life starts returning to normal. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, lifts the state’s stay-at-home order and the restaurant hosts its first customers after setting up outdoor seating. The family celebrates a birthday and a graduation with friends. Fun returns to Bad Axe: golf, bean bags, volleyball.
Then October 2020 arrives and the film takes a dark turn.
A group of customers at Rachel’s refuses to wear masks and gives the staff a ration of verbal abuse before finally leaving after police arrive. Later, CNN plays on a television above the bar, with the anchor noting the spike in anti-Asian violence.
Then David releases a trailer for his film, and the response sends chills through the family.
Angry comments pour in on Facebook, while the restaurant receives a letter from one customer saying their family will stop frequenting Rachel’s and suggesting the Sievs should head back to Cambodia.
The restaurant receives a call from one of the masked men at the BLM rally, furious that he’s being featured in the movie, which he says has an anti-racist agenda.
A woman on the phone with the man tells Rachel, surrounded by her family in the restaurant’s office, that she’s “going to end up digging yourself your own grave.”
Rachel says that Jaclyn, the most outspoken member of the family at the BLM protest, is their main target. And then she turns to the camera.
“I knew this was gonna happen the minute the backlash came from David,” she says of the response to her son’s film preview. “David you don’t live here, you have no clue.”
Chun’s response is to arm up. He teaches his daughter how to use a shotgun, and how to position herself to take out an intruder at their home.
When Raquel says she thinks two pickup trucks are following her home after work, Chun stakes out the restaurant with a gun in hand — telling his daughter to lay low if there’s shooting.
After more than two decades as a pillar of the Bad Axe community, it’s unclear if the Sievs are welcome in the midst of the pandemic.
And it seems that Chun’s warnings were prophetic. The family debates whether David should go ahead with the movie, worried its release will only invite more scorn from the community.
“As long as nobody gets hurt it’s worth it,” Jaclyn says. “Like words and threats and letters and messages and mail, it’s like those are just things, if that’s the worst it’s gonna be then it’s worth it.”
The documentary premiered in March 2022 at the SXSW festival, and the family has not shied from the spotlight since. David appeared along with his sister and father on MSNBC in November, the month the film was released. ABC News and a Detroit television station are among the other outlets to cover the documentary and interview family members.
Jaclyn, who clashed with her father throughout the film, told MSNBC host Alicia Menendez that her parents had raised their kids to do what was right and speak up for those without voices — even if they didn’t agree on the timing.
Chun said the experience made him start listening to his children, whose generation he credited for shifting the electoral landscape after the Trump years.
David told Menendez that he wanted to show how the American dream has shifted for immigrant families, who were still struggling to secure their place after decades of hard work and efforts to integrate into communities.
Chun and Rachel’s generation was focused on financial stability and sending their kids to college, David says of his parents.
“For our generation, that’s kind of shifted and evolved a little bit. It of course includes all of that, but there’s this other element now that we want to be seen. We want to have our voices. We want our experiences to be viewed as part of the American experience,” he said.
“We want to open up that conversation about what is the American experience.”
With his visual document of Bad Axe, David Siev has made his family an inspiring part of that conversation.