Consciously or not, for better and for worse, life is shaped by the decisions we and others have made in the past. In “Make Way for Tomorrow”, we encounter a number of characters and real-life individuals remembering, reminiscing, honoring, or mourning their pasts. One pair of films gracefully handle the emotions of young Vietnamese American women losing their parents (I Want You to Live and Video Funeral), learning more about themselves and their parents in the wake of loss. Meanwhile, The Resting Place: Nơi An Nghỉ documents how a group of Vietnamese Americans from the Tacoma area in Washington state banded together to established a shared cemetery to honor members who have passed.

The three other films in this set have less to do with death, and find their answers among those still here. Golden Seams of Love unpackages the seemingly tense relationship between the filmmaker’s parents, and how it abides, despite their many vehement disagreements. Meanwhile, Homeseek and Family flow like dreams – the former transporting a grandmother to her childhood and the latter a musical interlude influenced by the filmmaker’s child memories within a Vietnamese Hungarian family in ‘90s Budapest. – Eric Nong