Your Day Is My Night

During the nineteenth century on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the working class often lived in crowded tenements; out of economic necessity, some shared beds, sleeping in shifts. Today in New York’s Chinatown, shift-bed apartments still exist, tiny rooms filled with mattresses on bunk beds and the floor. In Lynne 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.