Robert C. Winn

Suki Terada Ports is an unstoppable Japanese American NYC elder who has been a tireless activist for the AAPI Community for decades. She has fought for Civil Rights in the 1960s, school integration, prison reform, female healthcare equality, LGBTQ+ rights, HIV/AIDS prevention and support, before the AAPI community would even recognize it. In this film, we follow Suki as she goes from her neighborhood in Harlem where she’s lived for over 87 years to a lunch at her friend’s apartment in downtown. A conversation of action, identity, and belonging emerges between three generations of AAPI activists and storytellers.

Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, Vietnamese refugees have built the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam, in Orange County, California. In 1999, "Little Saigon" burst onto the national stage when a store owner displayed a poster of Ho Chi Minh, triggering protests by Vietnamese Americans struggling to reconcile their past demons with their present lives. Saigon, U.S.A. uses this moment to examine this community's changing identity and growing empowerment.

GRASSROOTS RISING, directed by Robert C. Winn, explores the re-emergence of Asian Pacific American labor activism in Los Angeles among people from all walks of life, from a Pilipino American domestic worker, a Chinese American laundry worker-turned-union activist, a Korean American restaurant waitress fighting wage theft, a group of Thai women forced to labor in an underground sweatshop, to Korean American and Mexican American grocery store workers fighting for safer working conditions. The film offers a moving tribute to the working class roots of the Asian American experience, focusing on the resurgence of grassroots political activism among the City of Angels’ Asian, Latino, and other working class families.