The Phans Of Jersey City

After the fall of Saigon, the twenty-member Phan family moved to a small house in Jersey City, where a team of independent filmmakers recorded how the family copes with American society and vice versa. J. Hoberman comments in The Village Voice on the film, which was selected for the Museum of Modern Art's New Directors series:

“The Phans Of Jersey City is a documentary that estranges America by presenting it through the immigrant eyes of an upper-class South-Vietnamese clan, who use menial jobs and family solidarity to work their inevitable way toward Hamburger Heaven.

“The 20 Phans live in a modest frame house, with nearly as many filmmakers...recording their every move.... They're hardly boat people; one suspects that Colonel Phan and family were halfway to New Jersey while still in Saigon.... The film, which is only 49 minutes long and studded with unsettling, poetic images - the colonel and his wife dancing a slow tango in their living room, the family wandering through the Paramus Mall as though it were the Louvre - could easily have been longer. It's hard to say if a sequel or a sitcom is in order.”