For Your Consideration screening of Third Act and We Were the Scenery
Bring your friends and family to the For Your Consideration screening of Third Act, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, and the short film, We Were the Scenery. Variety calls Third Act “a realistic portrait of America” and “a story of perseverance and how some people make their life’s work stand for more than just a personal accomplishment.”
Third Act
Generations of artists call Robert A. Nakamura “the godfather of Asian American media,” but his son and the director of JANM’s Frank H. Watase Media Arts Center, Tadashi Nakamura, calls him Dad. As Parkinson’s disease clouds Robert’s memory, Tad sets out to retrieve his story—and in the process discovers his own.
Using the lessons Robert taught him, Tad deciphers the legacy of an aging man who was just a child when he survived America’s concentration camps, a successful photographer who gave it up to tell his own story, an activist at the dawn of a social movement—and a father whose struggles won his son freedoms that eluded Japanese Americans of his generation. Throughout the years they made films together, with Robert always by Tad’s side. Third Act was their last.
We Were the Scenery
In 1975, Hoa Thi Lê and Hue Nguyen Che fled from Vietnam by boat and docked in the Philippines, where they were utilized as background extras during the filming of Apocalypse Now. This documentary short film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2025 and won the Short Film Jury Prize: Nonfiction, the Special Jury Prize for Short Documentary Film at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, Best International Short Documentary Film at Galway Film Fleadh, Best International Short Dox at DokuFest, and the Excellence in Short Filmmaking Documentary and Audience Award at the Asian American International Film Festival.
We Were the Scenery / U.S.A. & Canada (Director: Christopher Radcliff, Writer and Producer: Cathy Linh Che, Producer & Cinematographer: Jess X. Snow). 15 minutes.