Welcome back, everyone! I’m very excited to share with you an interview with one of my personal heroes, New York and Portland-based filmmaker and activist Adele Pham. On this episode, we bonded over being daughters of immigrants, and we also discussed her hit documentary Nailed It, class and cultural identity, the influence of multi-cultural stories in film, and what it’s like to live as a person of color with a hyphenated American identity in this country.
Adele’s work has screened at over 20 film festivals, The Smithsonian, and HBO. She is a woman of many talents, devoting her time to multiple projects while freelancing as a cinematographer and editor. Her clients include HBO, PBS, BBH, Newsweek and New York Magazine.
Her documentary, Nailed It, premiered on PBS in May 2019 and is the highest streamed film of the America Reframed series. Her next feature, State of Oregon, uses the 2016 murder of Larnell Bruce Jr. by a white supremacist in Gresham, Oregon as a touchstone to the state’s founding as a separatist white homeland a century and a half earlier. A short film by the same name was released by Field Of Vision in 2017: https://www.fieldofvision.org/state-of-oregon.
About NAILED IT
“In virtually every city, state and strip mall across the U.S., women get their nails done in salons likely owned by Vietnamese entrepreneurs. How did this community come to dominate an $8 billion dollar nail economy? Nailed It takes viewers from Los Angeles to the Bronx to meet the diverse people and relationships behind this booming and enigmatic trade. Nailed It premiered on PBS in May 2019, and is the highest streamed film of the America Reframed series. Uncover the real history of the Vietnamese nail salon!” – naileditdoc.com
A special thanks to Adele Pham’s team, GIVERNY Lab, and Houston Cinema Arts Society for making this interview possible.
Listen to the episode:
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