Bad Axe

Synopsis

Director: David Siev
Producers: Jude Harris, Diane Quon, Katarina Vasquez, David Siev
101 min, 2022

Winner of the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize for “exceptional intimacy in storytelling” at the SXSW Film Festival, Bad Axe follows filmmaker David Siev as he returns to his hometown of Bad Axe, Michigan at the onset of the pandemic to chronicle his family at a crossroads. As the virus grows, the multicultural Cambodian-Mexican Siev family struggles to keep their mom-and-pop restaurant afloat, while the pressures of Trumpian values and Neo-Nazis in their rural hometown increasingly ratchets up the tension. What unfolds is a captivating real-time portrait of 2020, both intensely personal and deeply universal, and a remarkable encapsulation of the major issues of our times–from race and class to trauma and tribalism. Touching, cathartic, and filled with “rich and quiet nuance” (Austin Chronicle), Bad Axe is “a love letter to overcoming adversity” (RogerEbert.com).