Artist in Person Veteran documentarian Loni Ding retells and reframes Asian American history in a thoroughly engaging and thought-provoking way in her stunning new work, Ancestors in America. The first in a planned four-part series, it tackles the story of Asian migration to the Americas, beginning with the first instances of Filipinos to Louisiana in the early 1600s and focusing in this piece on Chinese movement to the Americas. Ancestors traces pivotal moments such as the devastating opium wars in the late 1800s (and) the slavery and forced migration of Chinese coolies to the Americas. Dramatically narrated by an imaginary figure of a timeless Asian American, Ancestors in America also takes an interdisciplinary approach, pulling from historical events, economics, cultural debates, and the rhetoric of race theories to present a rich, complex, and uncompromised history of Asian movement. By recovering key moments in the experiences of different groups of Asian arrivals, the film seeks to reveal histories forgotten, denied, and marginalized.