Bad Axe

Bad Axe

We are just scratching the surface when it comes to documentaries about life in America in the early 2020s. The pandemic’s toll on humanity will define this period, but that historic event also unleashed other issues, such as economic disparity and racial injustice among others. David Siev’s moving and uplifting “Bad Axe” is the most important film made about this time so far; it has already won awards on the festival circuit and is now getting a limited theatrical release.

I have thought about this movie more than any other movie this year. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it got me through some tough times in 2022 because it depicts family resilience against hardship. Many of the aforementioned nonfiction films about 2020 and 2021 will fail because they try to tell every story at once “Bad Axe” tells one story but manages to tell so many more.

Bad Axe is such a small town in Michigan that I had never heard of it despite growing up in the same state. It’s one of those places where most people drive through on their way somewhere else, but those communities often breed deep bonds among residents. Everyone knows everyone else in a small town like Bad Axe, and everybody knew Rachel’s family restaurant and its owners including director Siev’s father Chun.

A very young refugee from Cambodia’s Killing Fields, Chun built a family and life for himself in Michigan his story could have been powerfully told by David even without recent events because it is one of trauma and survival, which coexist within so many immigrants to America.

Of course, everything changed for the Sievs with COVID-19, which brought David home to Bad Axe from his life in New York City. As businesses closed, health became insecure, and even a sense that their community had turned its back on them developed he chose to document those around him struggling.

“Bad Axe” really gets how much national anxiety of the 2020s widened chasms already present within our society pushing historically opposed people against each other forevermore more broadly than we can imagine or see from bigger cities alone but there exists something so tactile about how here pandemics revealed structural weaknesses among small towns like bad axe where families weren’t sure whether or not local business would keep them fed while different sides protested night after night over whose side was right during quarantine.

Siev captures heated arguments over whether or not Chun should go into work given his age coupled with raging pandemic conditions throughout 2020 which were only rivaled by fear itself; fear felt not just physically but economically too all around us everywhere we looked outside every window exposed sunlight beams hitting pavement below just waiting patiently until something happens again soon enough like always before except this time things might be different somehow.

When civil rights protests reach Michigan in 2020, lighter fluid is sprayed on an already simmering fire in Bad Axe. Jaclyn, the daughter who movingly puts much of her life on hold to be there for her family, posts BLM support on the restaurant’s social page and goes to a rally in a county that probably went heavy Trump. It all heightens the tension in the Siev household, and “Bad Axe” becomes even richer as it asks how much we’re willing to sacrifice for the causes we believe in. How many people are silent because they fear what will happen to their business or their family if they speak up?

One might dismiss “Bad Axe” as a collection of home movies after all, it’s indisputable that no one had access like the director had. That’s a shallow critique that overlooks how deftly Siev assembles what surely was hundreds of hours of footage shot over many months in 2020. He turns what happened to his family into art, moving organically from major events to minor ones, assembling a narrative that feels universal regardless of which side of the political divide you sit on.

“Bad Axe” could have been such an angry film; it could have shouted back at a community that arguably turned its back on the director’s family. Yet it’s such a loving, graceful, gentle film a movie that knows the best way to get you to care about someone like Siev is to get you to know him. In this sense it’s an argument for empathy a plea for people who disagree with each other to simply listen to each other’s stories. It seems like it may be the only way back together again.

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