This flavorful set explores the intricate relationships between food, memory, and identity. Through diverse storytelling techniques – documentary, animation, and poetic realism – each film reveals how culinary practices serve as acts of survival, connection, and self-definition.

This set’s bookends, Teb Chaw (Land) and The Market, document the resilience of Asian diaspora communities rebuilding their lives after war and displacement. Teb Chaw offers a collective portrait of Hmong refugee farmers in Minnesota who, after surviving the Secret War in Laos, enrich Minnesotan cuisine and cultivate new livelihoods. The Market brings us to the Southeast Asian Market in Philadelphia’s FDR Park, a vibrant, refugee-founded space where ancestral cuisines nourish both body and community.

These Yellow Stars of Ours and Vegetarian Beef Skewers shift focus to the domestic kitchen, where intergenerational dialogues reveal the weight and beauty of diasporic inheritance. The former is a multimedia documentary combining interviews, archival footage, and animation to chronicle a Vietnamese couple’s migration story. In the latter, a mother teaches her son to make a family dish, while sharing memories of exile and displacement.

By contrast, Today Is My Day Off (Von 0 auf 180) explores emotional distance rather than intimacy. In their sparsely-attended restaurant, a daughter and father struggle with estrangement, rendering a quiet portrait of intergenerational disconnect and reconciliation. Finally, the animated Little Persimmon animates the story of a little girl who mourns her grandfather through his favorite fruit-persimmon. Alongside imagination and scent, love persists—sweet and enduring, like the persimmon itself. 

Together, these films celebrate food as a portal to heritage, healing, and (re)connection. 

By Xiangu Qi