Sokly ny biography

Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at 7pm
Spencer Nakasako and Sokly Ny's a.k.a. Don Bonus
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn

Introduced by Matt Wolf

a.k.a. Don Bonus, Spencer Nakasako and Sokly Ny, 1995, digital projection, 55 mins

In 1995, Cambodian-born Sokly “Don Bonus” Ny met filmmaker Spencer Nakasako at a workshop held by a youth development center in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. The nonprofit had engaged Nakasako as an artist in residence; his job was, as he put it, “teaching Southeast Asian street kids how to make movies about their own lives.” An outgoing teenager, Ny immediately showed an affinity for videomaking, and Nakasako encouraged him to keep a camcorder diary. The results of a year of self-documentation unfold in the finished work, a.k.a. Don Bonus, as an emotionally wrenching chronicle of 90s adolescence. Episodes of high schoolers goofing around are here counterposed with the grim realities faced by Ny’s refugee family, still struggling to survive in the housing | A.K.A. Don Bonus – Young Cambodian Documents His Life in ...!