Some of my earliest memories of movies are movie nights at home, when my entire family would pile into my parents’ bedroom to watch Legally Blonde, High School Musical, or Pitch Perfect together. After I moved to China, movies became a kind of comfort, and for a while, they were one of the only places where I could hear people speaking English around me. I think that’s part of why I became so attached to them. Even when the story had nothing to do with my own life, hearing a familiar language and watching characters move through worlds I understood gave me a small sense of familiarity. The movies and shows here are some of the ones that have stayed with me, especially the ones that made me think more about home, identity, and what it feels like to be caught between places.
Year: 2004
Director: Steven Spielberg
Genre: Comedy / Drama
Viktor Navorski arrives at JFK just as a coup breaks out in his home country, leaving him unable to enter the United States or return home. He ends up living inside the airport terminal, slowly turning a place of waiting into something that resembles a home. While watching the movie for the second time, I appreciated the irony of how Viktor is surrounded by people arriving from somewhere and leaving for somewhere else, yet he is the one person who cannot go anywhere. One scene that has always stuck with me is when Viktor begins learning English by reading magazines and signs around the airport. His attempts to communicate are comedic, but there is also something vulnerable about watching him try to make himself understood in a place where he has almost no control. I came away thinking about how much a passport or a piece of paper can determine whether someone is allowed to belong somewhere.
Year: 2021
Director: Jon M. Chu
Genre: Musical / Drama
Set in Washington Heights, the film follows Usnavi and the people around him as they work, dream, and wonder whether their futures belong in New York or somewhere else. One of my favorite scense is when Abuela Claudia looks back on leaving Cuba and building a life in New York, the whole neighborhood seems to live inside her memories for a few minutes. What I love about In the Heights is that the characters are still figuring out what they owe to the places they came from and what they want from the place they live now. It made me think about how a neighborhood can become its own kind of home for people who have had to leave one behind.
Year: 2022
Directors: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert
Genre: Science Fiction / Comedy / Drama
Evelyn Wang is a Chinese immigrant running a laundromat with her husband when she suddenly discovers that she has to connect with versions of herself across the multiverse. Beneath all the chaos, there's a story about a woman wondering whether the life she chose was the right one. When Evelyn and Waymond become rocks, there is almost no dialogue, yet somehow that conversation said so much about loneliness and wanting to be understood. The film made me think about all the different versions of ourselves that might exist depending on where we live, who we love, and the choices we make. For an immigrant family, that question feels especially complicated because the life you built can sometimes feel like both a choice and a sacrifice.
Year: 2022
Directors: Carlos Hagerman and Jorge Villalobos
Genre: Animated Documentary
This animated documentary, which started our as an Oral History Project, follows young people growing up in undocumented immigrant families in the United States, using their own stories to explore what it means to live with the possibility of separation and deportation. The animations were immensely powerful as it gave the characters a visual space to express things that might be difficult to show through traditional documentary footage. The title itself also intrigued me. For some people, home can be somewhere they have never been able to fully claim, even when it is the only place they have ever really known. It left me thinking about how unfair it is to ask someone to prove that they belong somewhere when that place already feels like home to them.
Year: 2007
Director: Richard LaGravenese
Genre: Drama
Erin Gruwell begins teaching at a racially divided high school in Long Beach, where her students have grown up surrounded by violence, prejudice, and distrust. The students eventually begin writing honestly about their lives in journals, giving them a way to tell stories that people around them had never bothered to hear. I especially liked the scene when they played the line game. Here, students who had been separated by race realize how much trauma they actually have in common. I was especially drawn to Eva and Sindy, whose experiences as a Latina student and Cambodian refugee show how displacement and racial identity can shape the way someone sees the world. The film reminded me why I care so much about storytelling in the first place because sometimes being given the chance to tell your own story changes how you see yourself.
The Visitor
Year: 2007
Director: Tom McCarthy
Genre: Drama
Walter Vale is a lonely professor whose life changes when he discovers an immigrant couple, Tarek and Zainab, living in his New York apartment. After Tarek is arrested and sent to an immigration detention center, Walter becomes involved in trying to help him. The contrast between the scenes where Walter learns to play the djembe with Tarek and the later scenes inside the detention center is so powerful. Music gives Walter a way into a community he had previously kept himself separate from, and then suddenly the person who brought him into that world is behind a wall. The film made immigration feel less like a political issue and more like something that can completely change an ordinary friendship.
Year: 2011
Director: Chris Weitz
Genre: Drama
Carlos Galindo is an undocumented Mexican immigrant working as a gardener in Los Angeles and trying to give his teenage son Luis opportunities he never had. After his truck is stolen, Carlos and Luis search for it together, repairing a relationship that had become strained. When Carlos is deported, Luis watches him leave and promises to make something of the opportunities his father fought to give him. Then Carlos begins the journey back across the border, and when he is asked if he is ready to go to the other side, he answers that he is going home. That last line brought up a new perspective of what “home” can mean. A person can be forced away from their family, their work, and the country where they built their life, and still carry the idea of home with them.
Year: 2023
Director: Celine Song
Genre: Drama / Romance
Nora and Hae Sung grow up together in South Korea before Nora's family emigrates to Canada. Twenty years later, they meet again in New York, and the distance between the people they were and the people they have become suddenly feels very real. One of my favorite scenes is the final walk between Nora and Hae Sung. There is so much left unsaid, and the silence makes the distance between them feel even larger. I love that the film never tries to make Nora choose between her past and present. Instead, it asks what happens when the person you might have become exists somewhere else, in another language and another city. I think about this movie whenever I think about how moving away can change you in ways that you don't notice until you return.
Year: 2026
Director: Lan Hongchun
Genre: Drama / Family
A grandson travels to Thailand searching for his grandfather, only to discover that the man died long ago and that the letters sent home to his grandmother were written by someone else. The letters, or qiaopi, connected the family across decades and across the South China Sea. I loved the idea of letters carrying a relationship across a distance that could not be crossed easily in person. There is something moving about seeing migration through the person who leaves and the person who waits at home. The film made me think about how much of an immigrant's life can exist in the stories and objects they leave behind, even when later generations know very little about what actually happened.
Year: 2021
Creators: Ava DuVernay and Colin Kaepernick
Genre: Drama / Docudrama
This series follows football star and activist Colin Kaepernick's adolescence as he grows up as a Black adopted child in a white family and begins confronting questions about race, culture, and his own identity. One scene that stayed with me is when Colin begins realizing that the way other people see him does not match the way his parents see him. His parents love him, but that does not mean they can fully understand what it is like for him to move through the world as a Black teenager. I connected with the show's interest in the gap between who you know yourself to be and how other people categorize you. It reminded me that belonging isn't always about being welcomed into a family or community. Sometimes it is about whether the people around you actually understand the parts of you that make you different from them.
Year: 2015–2020
Creator: Nahnatchka Khan
Genre: Sitcom / Family Comedy
Based on Eddie Huang's memoir, the series follows a Taiwanese American family who moves from Washington, D.C.'s Chinatown to suburban Orlando in the 1990s. Eddie struggles to fit into his new environment while his parents try to build their version of the American dream. I like that the show can make cultural misunderstandings comedic without pretending that they aren't difficult. Eddie is constantly trying to figure out how much of himself he should change to fit in, while his parents are trying to hold onto the culture they brought with them. Some of my favorite moments are the ones where the family is simply at home together, because they show that immigration isn't only about the dramatic parts of moving countries. A lot of it is figuring out how to make an ordinary life feel like yours. Reminds me about my own life and experiences.
Year: 2022
Director: Arthur Rodger “Harley” Maranan
Genre: Short Film
A Vancouver-based travel agent tries to recreate her ailing Filipino housemaid's childhood home before she dies. When yaya (the housemaid) asks to see the sister she has not spoken to since leaving the Philippines, the attempt to recreate her old home becomes something much more personal. What struck me was the idea of trying to rebuild a place from someone else's memories. Yaya has spent so much of her life away from the Philippines that home exists partly through what she remembers and what other people can reconstruct for her. The film is short, but tackles pressing questions such as how migration can make home into something you carry in your head rather than somewhere you can simply return to.
