As her father lay dying in a hospital bed, Fahm Saeyang and her siblings gathered around to watch over him. The family's tradition on many occasions, both big and small, was to record everything on video, and this was no exception. Her father's final words were about walking through the mountains in his home country of Thailand. After his death, Fahm grieved for the unfulfilled promise of her father's life. A shaman in Thailand, he had been respected and treasured by the Mien villagers for his knowledge and wisdom. But like many of the Mien people who found themselves in the path of the Vietnam War, he and his wife and young children had been driven out of their mountain village, then picked up and transplanted to the plains of Kansas to live with an Amish family. From the time of his arrival in America, Yoon Fong Saeyang lost his way, falling victim to poverty, violence and a drug addiction that destroyed his family. What kind of man was he really? And how could his daughter come to understand him? Fahm Saeyang responded to her father's unsettled life and death by taking a reverse journey on film to examine the heartbreaking path he took from respectability to hopelessness - and from Southeast Asia to America - in a heartfelt personal mission to understand his tragic story.

This dual journey helps DEATH OF A SHAMAN examine with painful honesty how Fahm's Mien immigrant family suffered through a 20-year ordeal of poverty, racism, religions, drugs, jail and the murder of a family member. It is a chronicle of a darker side of the pursuit of the American dream that affected many of the 40,000 Mien who came from a primitive life in the mountains of Southeast Asia to America. DEATH OF A SHAMAN is also a moving account of Fahm's need to understand her father's pain, and a desire to figure out what will placate his troubled spirit and her own. Best Feature Documentary Award, Oakland International Film Festival