Creator

David Grabias

David Grabias is a Los Angeles-based documentary director who co-directed Sentenced Home, about Cambodian American deportees.

David Grabias is a Los Angeles documentary director and producer who co-directed Sentenced Home, about Cambodian Americans facing deportation.[1] He is a founder of Artifact Studios, and his films have aired on PBS, A&E, Discovery, FX and National Geographic.[1][2]

Sentenced Home

Grabias first learned that Cambodian Americans were being deported to Cambodia in the summer of 2002, while working on another project in the Khmer community of Lowell, Massachusetts.[3] With Nicole Newnham he co-directed, co-produced and co-wrote Sentenced Home, which follows three Cambodian American men in Seattle, Kim Ho Ma, Loeun Lun and Many Uch. The three came to the United States as refugees in the 1980s and faced deportation after felony convictions and prison sentences.[1][4][5] Public defender Jay Stansell introduced the filmmakers to Kim Ho Ma.[6]

The film took more than three and a half years to make. The filmmakers set out to make an intimate film, told largely through cinéma vérité (filming events as they happen, with little narration) and through the eyes of the people facing deportation. They followed each stage of the process, from detention and legal struggles to waiting and resettling in Cambodia, and made five trips to Cambodia to follow the deportees as they built new lives there.[6] The crew spent days and nights in the men's homes. They filmed once with Loeun Lun in a Seattle detention center and once inside an immigration detention prison in Cambodia, and were refused further access in both countries.[3] Grabias has said it was the first time he cried while filming, and that the most rewarding part was showing the film to the deportees and their families.[3]

The film cuts between scenes in the United States and Cambodia, with few interviews and little on-screen text.[4] It was released in 2005 by the Center for Asian American Media and aired on the PBS series Independent Lens. It runs 56 minutes and is available on DVD; one catalog lists a running time of 15 minutes.[7][8][4] The filmmakers hoped it would lead viewers to weigh the human cost of immigration laws and their effects on families.[6] Grabias was a producer nominated for the 2007 News and Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Programming for the film.[1] On October 14, 2007, he appeared at a Pacific Arts Movement screening of the film.[3]

Operation Popcorn

Through Sentenced Home, Grabias came to know activists and students in the Southeast Asian American community. A Laotian graduate student told him about the arrests of Locha Thao and General Vang Pao, and after meeting Thao in Sacramento and attending an early Hmong community rally outside the federal courthouse, he began Operation Popcorn, about the Hmong community after the war in Vietnam.[9] The Center for Asian American Media and the California Humanities Council gave early funding and support. Many defendants and government agents declined to appear on camera, and the filmmakers used government surveillance video and audio to show events. A project he expected to last one or two years took seven.[9] The film premiered on May 17, 2016, on World Channel in the series America ReFramed.[9]

Grabias has said he did not set out to make films about Southeast Asian American communities, and that his work often returns to the idea of home, which draws him to social-issue stories.[9]

Other films

Grabias was nominated for an Emmy as a producer of the Discovery Channel two-hour special Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry, narrated by Sigourney Weaver.[10] He directed and produced The Real Exorcists, a one-hour A&E documentary on exorcism around the world. His independent film Centralia, about a mine fire threatening a small Pennsylvania town, aired on PBS. He lived in Turkey for two years to finish Those Who Are In Love, a one-hour film on the country's vanishing tradition of folk minstrels.[1][2] He has made programs for Sony, Universal, Disney, Goldman Sachs and General Electric, and he produced the orientation film for the Getty Center. He also took on Money and Medicine as co-producer and co-director, a PBS documentary on the health insurance crisis.[1]

Grabias conceived Brailled It, a documentary built around the Braille Challenge at the Braille Institute in Los Angeles. Nine young participants carried cameras through the three-day competition and chose what to film. Editor Edgar Sardarian assembled their footage, and three of them became the film's main subjects. The children and their families saw an early cut, and their feedback shaped the edit and the audio description. The film uses very little music and includes 3D spatial audio from the Bay Area sound designer Immersive Sound.[11] It premiered at Slamdance in 2026 and was scheduled to open at the Quad Cinema in New York on September 4, the Tara Theatre in Atlanta on September 11 and Laemmle Glendale in Los Angeles on September 18, 2026.[11]

Works


See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 ITVS
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 PBS Independent Lens
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Pacific Arts Movement, Q&A with David Grabias, co-director of Sentenced Home (October 13, 2007)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 amherst.edu, Sentenced Home - Amherst Creates (2007-01-01)
  5. ↑ Center for Asian American Media, Back to School Special: Asian American Films about Immigration and Refugees (August 30, 2017)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 itvs, (PDF) discussion guide - ITVS
  7. ↑ Alexander Street, Sentenced Home
  8. ↑ Khmerican, Review: Nicole Newnham and David Grabias' Sentenced Home
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 CAAM
  10. ↑ ITVS, Sentenced Home - ITVS (2025-10-06)
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 The Moveable Fest, Interview: David Grabias on Brailled It (September 5, 2026)
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This page was last edited on 26 September 2026, at 23:35.