
Refugee
US, 2003, video, color, 60 min.
Spencer Nakasako has pioneered a powerful new form of camcorder diary in collaboration with young Southeast Asian refugees in youth video programs he mentored in San Francisco. For more than a decade, Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian youths have produced short videos based on their personal memories and experiences. Here, three young refugees raised on the streets of San Francisco’s tough Tenderloin district (the “T.L.”) journey to Cambodia in this latest documentary from Nakasako. At the center of the film is Michael “Adoe” Siv, a gregarious twenty-four-year-old who moves easily between the worlds of the street and the university, as well as Cambodian and American cultures. He and his mother escaped their native country during the 1979 Vietnamese invasion, but Mike decides to go back to meet his long-lost father and brother. Accompanied by long-time friends Paul Meas and David Mark, he sets off on a journey that takes him to a new Cambodia rising up from the killing fields, and ventures into the blurred entanglements of his family’s past.