The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) 2025 CAAMFest returns to San Francisco Thursday, May 8 – 11.
The film New Wave will be featured on Sunday, May 11, with a screening at SFMOMA. Director Elizabeth Ai invites viewers to relive the music from the 80s with a twist. Ai initially sets the stage for a dance down memory lane to document and share her life and journey. As Ai delves deeper into the events, people, and music that has so shaped her life, what emerges are her own crucial discoveries of her past, her youth, and the lost years of her strained and estranged relationship with her own mother. These pivotal events become more significant as Ai becomes a mother herself. The director has crafted a film that moves from a dance party to deeply personal and thoughtful realizations, to emotional and visceral confessions and admissions.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
In your film New Wave, you deftly weave layers of generational connections, successes, and traumas in your life and the lives of those you feature in the film. There were also events, loss, and emptiness that spans decades. Are there plans for a follow-up, or is this a stand-alone project for you?
Ai: It is a standalone, however my next project is moving the timeline up. Instead of me as a little kid in the 1980s, [it will] be loosely based on my life as a teenager in the late 1990s, when I was on the cusp of my own adulthood. [In this movie] I was paying homage to that first generation, and learning to connect it to me as a second-generation Vietnamese/Chinese-American person. Now I know there is such a deep mother wound, which I only learned while making this film, and that these bonds were broken for me as a child. Every single person in the diaspora suffers from those wounds. If not the mother wounds, the wounds of displacement. In those rifts in the relationships, I was thinking about the intergenerational relationship through the decades and years, and in my next project what I want to do is even more focus, more specificity on what that did to me as a young person. It will be a work of fiction, it will be a feature narrative.
The maternal theme throughout your film is noticeable. Tell us about that connection.
Ai: The maternal thread does run deeply through the film and is a strong throughline. It could be the mother as the breadwinner for her family, while also taking care of everyone. I learned about my own motherhood, and what that entailed. With my mom, maybe in ways she abandoned me to service the entire family. And with Ian (Nguyen, aka DJ BPM) in the film, it was the absence of a mother and what that did between him and his father. When she finally came, Ian didn’t feel connected with her. In all the stories, there is a maternal thread.
Honesty and innocence play prominently in your film. The honesty of the innocence of youth (the music and dancing), and also in conversation, your young daughter’s one word question opening the floodgates of personal, cultural, and historical memories. How did you navigate and balance this process?
Ai: I think that was part of the transformative moment in the film: a cocktail or confluence of events that happened. I was getting close to a rough cut of the original version, which was more of a historical lookback - who were the Vietnamese pop stars, their accomplishments and where are they now - then my teammates would ask ‘Why is this film so personal to you?’ Advisors, producers, editors - everyone around me encouraged me to go deeper in terms of knowing why I was doing this. This was to be a celebratory lookback, but they would ask ‘Why are you crying during these interviews? Why are you so moved?’ I had to do a lot of soul searching. The straw that broke the camel’s back - in answer to your question - was my daughter (then 3 ½ years old) asking her simple, innocent questions. And I didn’t have answers for her. The moments captured in the film were also the first time I could find the words. My teammates and my husband love me, care for me, and give me space to share.
In the film, acceptance comes to mind. Presenting things as they are, letting relationships be as they are, and moving on.
I think it is more so than acceptance, I think that was where I was at, accepting despite my feelings. There was also forgiveness. With my mom, there’s forgiveness for her and also forgiveness for myself for not knowing what I know. I didn’t have to live a life where bombs were flying over my head, I wasn’t in the bomb shelters, I didn’t witness the horrific images she did. Things I just didn’t know about her, why she is the person she is. She shared her memories with me and I still get choked up when I talk about it.
Do you feel like you want to change things for your daughter, while maintaining the legacy of your own mom and what she went through?
I don’t know if I can change anything. I think that making New Wave was the change. Making this film, being honest, and sharing community insight about our wounds. For me, New Wave is that change - to share these things in our community that we are often silent about. I’m giving a voice to it, I’m giving it an experience. I tried to share a narrative that is nuanced, multi-generational, driven by community and really centers our people. If it touches somebody, I’ve done my job.
*****
NEW WAVE
Directed by Elizabeth Ai
SFMOMA
151 Third St. / SF
May 11, 2025 | 3:00PM
https://caamfest.com/2025/movies/new-wave/
Film companion book by Elizabeth Ai:
New Wave: Rebellion and Reinvention in the Vietnamese Diaspora
New Wave documentary links:
https://newwavedocumentary.com/
https://www.instagram.com/newwavedocumentary/
https://www.facebook.com/newwavedocumentary
https://www.eventsbybpm.com/about
2025 CAAMFest
May 8 – 11, 2025
For the complete festival line-up and to purchase tickets:
https://caamfest.com
CAAMFest / SF Venues:
AMC Kabuki Theater
Asian Art Museum
Koho Creative Hub
Roxie Theater
SFMOMA
https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/ruth-asawa-retrospective/
