ABSTRACT
The history of Asian American media began with the creation of documentary films in the 1970s, when Asian American artists and activists used the filmic medium to tell true stories about their struggles, their triumphs, and their everyday lives. Yet, since the 1990s, as Brian Hu discusses in this collection, the documentary tradition has been somewhat eclipsed by the onslaught of feature-length Asian American fiction films. With the potential for bigger budgets and technical professionalization, these smaller, more personal pictures seemed to fade from the spotlight. Yet, the Asian American documentary tradition never truly disappeared—and as we can see from examining some of the more popular Asian American documentaries from the 2010s, such films are still being made in a way that calls attention to social issues facing Asian American communities. In this chapter, I give a brief history of Asian American filmmaking and the themes that characterized their storytelling. I then examine three Asian American documentaries—Ramona Diaz’s Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey (2012), Evan Jackson Leong’s Linsanity (2013), and Tadashi Nakamura’s Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings (2012)—in order to consider these shifting sensibilities and thematics.
