Oscar nomination delights maker of Chinatown bank documentary, who’s proud of a film that ‘people really love’
Documentary filmmaker Steve James, often passed over for Academy Awards, feels great about nomination of Abacus: Small Enough to Fail, story of the only bank indicted in US after 2008 financial crisis and owners’ fight to clear their name
Filmmaker Steve James was watching the Academy Award nominations on television when he found out his film Abacus: Small Enough to Jail was in the running for this year’s Oscar best documentary.
“I sat there with my wife and it was a sweet moment. She gave me a kiss and went back to bed,” he said with a chuckle. James is at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, showing a documentary series called America to Me.
“I feel great. Over the years I have come to not have big expectations about this so it’s satisfying it happened,” James said. “I’m proud of the film but it didn’t have the [same] attention in the [United] States as The Interrupters, Life Itself or Hoop Dreams, so it was under the radar. But people really love the movie.
“Everywhere I go, I hear from people how much they love the movie and admire the Sungs for standing up for what they believe in,” he says. “And it’s a happy ending movie.”
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail is a 2016 documentary about how Thomas Sung, an immigrant lawyer from Shanghai, started a community bank in New York’s Chinatown to help other immigrants get access to bank loans, and what happened to it after the 2008 global financial crisis.