Jeanne C. Finley is an artist/filmmaker and professor of film and graduate fine arts at California College of the Arts

During the nineteenth century, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the working class often lived in crowded tenements and, out of economic necessity, some shared beds, sleeping in shifts. Today, in Chinatown, shift-bed apartments still exist, tiny rooms filled with mattresses on bunk beds and the floor. In Sachs's hybrid documentary, the bed is the focus of both personal and political stories of seven Chinese immigrants. Autobiographical monologues-scripted from interviews-are intermixed with verité conversations and reflections on the details of daily life, awakening a unique understanding of Chinese immigration.