A portrait of a Vietnamese-Canadian family opening up a restaurant and cocktail bar in Calgary's Chinatown, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

7.5Casa Bonita opened in 1974 in an unassuming strip mall. The massive "Disneyland of Mexican restaurants" is an Old West and Acapulco-inspired fever dream made famous by its indoor waterfall, cliff divers, and haunted caves, and was featured in a classic 2003 episode of South Park. When its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, learn that Casa Bonita might close its doors for good, they attempt to preserve a crumbling piece of their childhood and Denver history.
A Hmong guide's daily life in the mountains of Sapa, North Vietnam.
0.0In Saigon, family culture carries on as it has for centuries, even when blood ties are broken. Through a mosaic of intimate portraits, Má Sài Gòn explores humanity’s universal desire for love, acceptance, connection and belonging through an LGBTQ+ lens. The film is a love letter – a bittersweet ode to a comforting yet disturbing mother, to a city that is as liberating as it is oppressive.
6.3A Vietnamese documentary on human suffering and the meaning of kindness.
0.0An examination of the 60's trend of top-of-skyscraper revolving restaurants. First an overview of Europe's best then it's a detailed look at the problems involved in running the restaurant at the top of London's Post Office Tower.
8.0Forever, Chinatown is a story of unknown, self-taught 81-year-old artist Frank Wong who has spent the past four decades recreating his fading memories by building romantic, extraordinarily detailed miniature models of the San Francisco Chinatown rooms of his youth.
7.7Using archival footage, cabinet conversation recordings, and an interview of the 85-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts his life, from working as a WWII whiz-kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's president, to managing the Vietnam War as defense secretary for presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
0.0An absurd game of “finding happiness” is being played by local Latvian coyotes* and illegal immigrants on the Russian and the European Union border. It is a game with no winner – all participants are driven to play by the sense of despair. While one side leaves home and undertakes a perilous journey to the other side of the globe, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in a free country, the other side risks their freedom to earn a chance to stay right where they are, in their homeland. *coyote – someone who smuggles illegal immigrants
0.0As queer trans and gender non-conforming children of the Vietnamese diaspora, we are fragmented at the crossroads of being displaced from not only a sense of belonging to our ancestral land, but also our own bodies which are conditioned by society to stray away from our most authentic existence. Yet these bodies of ours are the vessels we sail to embark on a lifetime voyage of return to our original selves. It is our bodies that navigate the treacherous tides of normative systems that impose themselves on our very being. And it is our bodies that act as community lighthouses for collective liberation. Ultimately, the landscape of our bodies is our blueprint to remembering, to healing, to blooming.
0.0Focusing on the sport of chuckwagon racing at the Calgary Stampede, captured through a mix of aerial, POV, and ringside footage, the film is ahead of its time in the way it captures adrenaline-pumping action. This short documentary offers a ringside view of the chuckwagon race, star attraction of the world-famous Calgary Stampede. Once ponderous Percheron and Clydesdale draught thundered around the course. Now they are racers, and it takes a firm hand to guide such horsepower.
7.6Many times during his presidency, Lyndon B. Johnson said that ultimate victory in the Vietnam War depended upon the U.S. military winning the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people. Filmmaker Peter Davis uses Johnson's phrase in an ironic context in this anti-war documentary, filmed and released while the Vietnam War was still under way, juxtaposing interviews with military figures like U.S. Army Chief of Staff William C. Westmoreland with shocking scenes of violence and brutality.
0.0Bookended by call-to-action quotes from Margaret Mead and Mahatma Gandhi, this inspiring documentary follows three extraordinary women -- in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mali, and Vietnam -- as they lead day-to-day battles against ignorance, poverty, oppression, and ethnic strife.
0.0After nearly 40 years in operation, the family-run Koto Japanese Restaurant is closing down. Over the course of its final service, the small Vancouver Island community bids farewell.
5.0The story focus on Caridad and Georgina, who had learned the art of Cantonese Opera in Havana as a young age and performed as divas for over a decade before their lives were changed by Fidel Castro's revolution.
2.5A Hundred Years of Happiness; an observational documentary, is a personal portraiture of a Vietnamese farming family and their daughter Tram. While her father instils in her the importance of familial obligation to care for one’s ageing parents, her mother desires a secure future devoid of economic hardship. Determined to fulfil both her parent’s wishes, Tram pursues a new life in South Korea as a migrant bride, but her fast-tracked journey leaves little time for reflection.
Chinatown has had a big hit in 2020 with many business closing down, community members getting harassed and attacked by hate crimes. Yet the community perseveres as the artist continues to work. Henry Chang, born and raised in Chinatown, continues to live and work on Mott street. Part of the self-reclaimed “OG crew” of China- town, he is adored and respected by his community the way community leaders are. While prepping to shoot, Corky Lee, a legendary Asian-American photographer and friend to Henry for over a half a century, died of Covid. Corky's presence and art naturally seeped its way into the film. Henry Chang, the unofficial official community leader of Chinatown walks us through life and art as we transition from the Year of the Rat to the Year of the Ox.
7.3On June 3, 1973, a man was murdered in a busy intersection of San Francisco’s Chinatown as part of an ongoing gang war. Chol Soo Lee, a 20-year-old Korean immigrant who had previous run-ins with the law, was arrested and convicted based on flimsy evidence and the eyewitness accounts of white tourists who couldn’t distinguish between Asian features. Sentenced to life in prison, Chol Soo Lee would spend years fighting to survive behind bars before journalist K.W. Lee took an interest in his case. The intrepid reporter’s investigation would galvanize a first-of-its-kind pan-Asian American grassroots movement to fight for Chol Soo Lee’s freedom, ultimately inspiring a new generation of social justice activists.
10.0A unique portrait of New York's iconic Raoul's Restaurant - told through the eyes of a filmmaker-turned-accidental-restaurateur who was trying to make a film about his father who is also a filmmaker-turned-accidental-restaurateur.
0.0She was born in a cave, more than 60 years ago. Now she lives in a village, with many children and grandchildren to look after. Sometimes, she dreams of her dead mother calling her home – to the cave.
