A.K.A. Don Bonus

Audience Reviews

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Yasir S @Yasir2004 2h This movie captures the life of Spencer, and it is honestly very sad to see everything he goes through. He struggles in school and is at risk of failing his classes, which creates a lot of pressure on him. As a Cambodian immigrant in America, he faces challenges that go far beyond academics. The film does a powerful job of showing how difficult it can be to adjust to a new country while dealing with personal and social struggles. The documentary also highlights the conditions he lives in. He stays in a small apartment complex in a dangerous neighborhood where violence is common. One moment that really stood out to me was when a group of kids threw a rock through his grandmother’s window and broke it. That scene showed how unsafe and unstable his environment is. Spencer even talks about how there are shootings happening almost all the time around his area and how kids will shoot you for no reason. It really shows the harsh reality of his surroundings. See more Stephanie M @Stephanie358 2h This documentary gives a raw look at Don Bonus, a high school senior living in the Sunnydale housing projects, and shows how poverty, family stress, and the justice system shape his life. The film takes place during the 1990s, when tough-on-crime policies led to more youth being pushed into detention instead of getting support. We see how Don spends long hours commuting to school, stays home alone often, and turns to friends and basketball as an escape. His family’s history as refugees who fled war in Cambodia adds important historical context and explains the fear and instability they live with. The film’s close, observational style makes everything feel personal and real. Instead of judging him, it shows how lack of help and slow responses from systems leave vulnerable teens behind. It’s powerful and difficult, but important to watch. See more Angel V @Angelv268 10h Aka Don Bonus is a powerful and documentary that challenges traditional ideas about authorship, representation, and the ethics of storytelling. Set in 1990s San Francisco, the film follows Sokly Ny, a Cambodian American teenager navigating gang life, poverty, and trauma in the aftermath of his family’s escape from the Khmer Rouge regime. Rather than simply documenting Sokly’s life, Nakasako gives him the camera, allowing Sokly to film his own reality. This approach complicates the viewer’s role and raises important questions about who has the right to tell immigrant and refugee stories. The film is rooted in the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot and the refugee resettlement wave that brought many Southeast Asian families to the United States in the 1980s. Sokly’s anger, instability, reflect the long-term psychological effects of displacement. The film refuses to romanticize the "American Dream," instead exposing how systemic neglect and poverty shape immigrant youth experiences. See more Henry C @calgerh 11h This film made for a great insight into the life of a Hmong immigrant, through an almost online blog/day-in-the-life of format. And I suppose it's because that's exactly what it was. I liked the pacing of the mood in this film: shots of the kid partying and having fun would then lead to shots of him in his room describing some more negative occurrence that day/week/month. It may seem jarring to viewers, but those kinds of swings up and down is how life goes for some people, sometimes a great day comes crashing down in the end, or vice versa. I think this switch in tone and general realism of everything that was happening (since it really was happening in real life) really helped me empathize with the kid and everything he and his friends and family were going through, and since that is the point of the film, it did its job wonderfully. See more P9 h @Pbpbp99 11h Don Bonus I think it was a very powerful and an emotional film that was about a refugee teen named Soy any who was from Cambodia. It seemed Sokly struggled with a lot of different conflicts like family, identity and even some violence early on in his time in San Francisco. You might wonder where the name Don Bonus came from and it actually was a name he gave himself trying to create a new image for himself in the U.S.. This whole film really was something made fine history of his family fleeing from Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge genocide happened which was an even that killed many people really made people have to go to the United States. But one thing is Sokly wasn’t alone with his feeling of being between 2 different types of cultures. Something important that comes to my head from the film is how the director gave Sokly a recorder to show his life and I feel like this really made the film feel much more emotional and personal. Also what I really seen was trauma won’t leave. See more Danilo S @justaname 3d Don Bonus is a documentary that the audience is given about a Cambodian American teenager– which is Sokly Ny himself, who grew up in San Francisco that talks about the struggles of academics, poverty and the general life of the neighborhood. Don nearly failed to graduate because of the main struggles within the film while he has to balance it with the family responsibilities. With historical context, Don’s family history are Cambodian refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge era, facing struggles like family separation and the instability of being in the US. The film does allow this to happen throughout the entire video and shows the daily struggles to present the consequences. Furthermore, it uses raw footage which gave me an uncomfortable feeling that it was another way of having the audience feel that they’re in the same position as Don. But the film gives a placement of how the immigrant youth had to navigate through the difficult times but showed resilience in it. See more Read all reviews

A.K.A. Don Bonus

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