David Siev

Filmmaker whose documentary Bad Axe and short film Year Zero screened at the Cambodia Town Film Festival.

Creator details
Roles	Filmmaker
Subjects	Film & Moving Image

David Siev is a Cambodian-Mexican-American filmmaker who directed the documentary Bad Axe and the short film Year Zero. Bad Axe follows an Asian American family in rural Michigan fighting to keep its restaurant open during the pandemic.

Career

David Siev is a first-generation Cambodian-Mexican-American filmmaker, born and raised in the Midwest. He graduated from the University of Michigan film school in 2015 and moved from rural Michigan to Los Angeles to work in film. Before directing Bad Axe, he learned guerrilla filmmaking (fast, low-budget shooting with small crews) on projects under director Jeff Tremaine, including Bad Trip and The Dirt. His work includes directing, producing and cinematography. He lives in New York City and is developing narrative and documentary projects.

Year Zero

Year Zero was his directorial debut. The 16-minute narrative short, made in the United States, is in Khmer with English subtitles. It follows two brothers who risk everything to survive the violence and starvation after the Khmer Rouge takes control of Cambodia in 1975. The short was named Best Narrative Short at the 18th DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, and it won the same award at the Vancouver Asian Film Festival and the Manhattan International Film Festival, among others. It screened in the short film corner of the Cambodia Town Film Festival on September 15, 2018, at the Art Theatre in Long Beach.

Bad Axe

Bad Axe is his first feature. It is based on his family's restaurant in Bad Axe, Michigan, where he returned from New York at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. What began as a visit became a long stay, and he filmed day and night over several months. The film deals with the lockdown, rising racial tensions, backlash from a divided town, white supremacists and the intergenerational trauma of the Khmer Rouge genocide. Siev is credited as director, producer and cinematographer. He made the film as a two-person team with co-producer and editor Peter Wagner, who lived on the other side of the country, and he worked remotely with editor Rosie Walunas from rural Michigan. He marketed and crowdfunded the film while making it.

Siev has said his family talked through the risk of backlash, privacy and safety before agreeing to the film, and that they nearly asked him to stop. He calls the film a love letter to Bad Axe and to his family.

Bad Axe premiered at the SXSW Film Festival, where it won awards for "Exceptional Intimacy in Storytelling" and "Documentary Feature." That spring Siev signed a distribution deal with IFC. His work on the film received the Social Justice Award at the 2022 Critics Choice Celebration of Asian Pacific Cinema. The film ran 1 hour 40 minutes at a Cambodia Town Film Festival special screening at the Art Theatre of Long Beach on August 23, 2025, followed by a question-and-answer session with Siev.

Talks

In February 2023 he gave a TEDxUofM talk on the changing American Dream and the power of sharing one's story, including growing up as one of few families of color in Bad Axe.

Works

• Bad Axe (Film)

See also

• Bad Axe (film)
• Cambodia Town Film Festival
• All creators

References