Anthony Banua-Simon
Anthony Banua-Simon (he/him) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and editor named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 2021 “25 New Faces of Independent Film” and DOC NYC’s 2022 “40 Under 40.” His debut feature documentary, Cane Fire, was an official selection of the 2020 Hot Docs International Film Festival as well as the 2021 MoMA Doc Fortnight and won “Best Documentary Feature” at the 2020 Indie Memphis Film Festival and the 2021 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. His short documentary about two former workers of the Domino Sugar Refinery, Third Shift, won “Best Short Documentary” at the 2014 Brooklyn Film Festival and is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel. He's featured in The New York Times, Jacobin, BOMB Magazine, and HuffPost.
Presentations from Facing Race 2026
America sold the U.S. public a poster: the “American Worker.” The American Worker belongs here. He is patriotic and free. He is white and male. He built the nation, so the nation belongs to him. This film tears the myth open. In the wreckage of decades of mythmaking, an AAPI immigrant filmmaker embarks on a journey across time and geography to uncover how race, labor, and power have shaped belonging and exclusion in America’s story of work.
Directed by Thien Dinh, Produced by John Beder and Anthony Banua-Simon