Bonus tracks
Rewinding classic camcorder diary a.k.a. Don Bonus.
By Susan Gerhard

IN 1994, the same year seven pretty faces were transplanting themselves to pricey Lombard Street digs to famously enact some kind of "real world" in San Francisco, across town a very different kind of reality show was unfolding. An 18-year-old Cambodian refugee, who'd escaped the Khmer Rouge at age 3 by traveling on foot through the jungle with his family, was living without parental guidance in the Sunnydale housing projects and training the camera on himself. As edited, his daily routine might include some music vid-style travelogue moments, like petty gambling with his friends in the Tenderloin or rides through the city cut with R&B, Asian pop, or hip-hop. But more often the day played as straight horror. As on one late night when Sokly Ny (known as "Don Bonus" by his American friends) waited up for the police to check out the rock thrown through his sister's window, followed by a short night's sleep, which led to an early-morning hour-long bus ride to school – where he was greeted uncomprehendingly by officials who seemed to be ripped from the frames of Frederick Wiseman's 1968 High School.

"Surviving in the jungle!" his clueless English teacher said in disbelief as our narrator turned in his homework assignment. "Did you give yourself a machete?" she asked him, nearly mocking. He deadpanned back, strangely respectfully, "Yeah, I did."

While the popularity of Puck and Pedro indicated the video-diary format was exploding with possibilities for well-cast "realities," this one small documentary by Ny and Spencer Nakasako, his mentor at the Vietnamese Youth Development Center, was exploding the format. In fact, Ny had actually auditioned for The Real World and been rejected, Asian American film pioneer Renee Tajima-Peña told me. "Don Bonus wasn't the charismatic refugee-Horatio Alger story, and he wasn't the charismatic gangbanger with a heart of gold. He just seemed like a typical kid. But there's something in Nakasako's process that gets to a dramatic authenticity."

Nakasako, who's now been working with VYDC youth for more than a decade and created a trilogy of collaborative videos he calls the "refugee" series (Kelly Loves Tony and Refugee), jump-started the process before it was easy – when the editing was still linear and the Hi-8 tapes (in this case all 70 hours of them) had to be transferred to another format before being cut. Nakasako's advantage actually came from his fiction filmmaking past with Wayne Wang – his eye for a great story. As Nakasako remembered it, the shaky-camera aesthetic of the first-person camcorder diarist wasn't well understood in the early '90s. "I showed a five-minute rough cut to, I think, a PBS conference," he told me, "and somebody came up to me and said, 'You should really go to film school. You don't know how to shoot.' "

Thus encouraged, Nakasako and Ny didn't exactly realize what kind of genie they were letting out of the bottle when they finally finished the film. No large theatrical release was planned. Prescreenings in the T.L. brought out laughs from Ny's peers, not the tears they would get from festival audiences later. It hadn't been sent to Sundance for consideration but premiered here, at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Justin Lin – who would go on to disregard the pull toward "positive" imaging with his popular teen thriller Better Luck Tomorrow – was in that audience (his 10-minute film school short played before a.k.a. Don Bonus). He saw Ny's brother Touch sent to juvie for shooting a gun at a school bully and listened to Ny talk about the tense relationships between Asian Americans and African Americans in the projects. As Lin (who programmed the film into this year's fest) remembered, "It blew me away. I'd seen a lot of Asian American films, and there was always the sense of having to explain your existence as an Asian American. I loved how it was unapologetic."

Ten years later Lin's career is in full bloom. Nakasako's VYDC media center is now equipped with editing and shooting equipment that costs what a Cuisinart did back in the day. Touch – who at the film's end was sent to reform school in Pennsylvania but got out in time to pick up the film's Emmy award in New York (he phoned Nakasako to tell him that, on a bathroom break from the festivities, he'd ended up peeing right next to, drumroll, Henry Kissinger) – is now married. And a.k.a. Don Bonus – which should be credited as the patient zero of the teen-camcorder-diary epidemic – still looks as new and amazing as the day it debuted. So many awful realities later, a.k.a. Don Bonus can still jerk the tears.

Spencer Nakasako, Sokly Ny, and other members of the Ny family may be present at the screening of a.k.a. Don Bonus, Sat/12, 2:30 p.m., Kabuki. Short film Passing Through (Nathan Adolfson, USA/South Korea, 1998) also plays.