The film

Fleeing violence and persecution, refugees start new lives in the rural town of Storm Lake, Iowa⁠—⁠working the meatpacking line by day and reaching for something greater. Chronicling six years of their lives against a backdrop of political turmoil and a global pandemic, THE AMERICANS explores what the pursuit of happiness truly means.

THE AMERICANS opens on a photo of a family standing in a tropical jungle, as Ehler, a fifteen-year-old Karen girl, remembers childhood stories of America as a mythical, faraway place. It moves to Storm Lake, Iowa, in 2019: a multicultural town built around a Tyson meatpacking plant, where immigrant workers can earn a decent wage without English or a high school diploma.

Inside the plant the work is grueling and repetitive. Anna, who left nursing school to support her family in Africa, sends money home. Jephthah studies for his GED and dreams of becoming an electrician. Ehler teaches Karen words to her younger sister and confides the pressure she feels to succeed. Sam tends his garden and dreams of a quieter life. Then, in 2020, COVID-19 spreads through the plant.

Over the next five years the film follows the four of them to Sioux City, Milwaukee and Madison, through jobs lost and found, family obligations and private ambitions, asking what the pursuit of happiness means to people who arrived with nothing.

Director’s statement

I came to America from South Korea when I was eleven years old. For years, I grappled with what it meant to be Korean-American—caught between two cultures, never fully belonging to either. That experience became the lens through which I see the world, and ultimately the reason I made this film.

In 2019, during the height of anti-immigrant rhetoric, I traveled to Storm Lake, Iowa—a small town where refugees from Laos, Myanmar, South Sudan, and Latin America had been rebuilding their lives around a meatpacking plant for decades. The media coverage I found was well-intentioned but shallow. Immigrants were portrayed as either victims to be pitied or symbols of resilience to be celebrated. Rarely were they allowed to simply be people—with dreams, contradictions, humor, and exhaustion.

I wanted to bridge that gap. So I spent the next six years following four people: Sam, a Laotian man in his sixties who worked the Tyson line for twenty-two years before being let go during COVID; Jephthah, a Karen man from Myanmar who dreamed of getting his GED for a better job; Anna, a South Sudanese woman who left nursing school to send money home and never quite found her way back; and Ehler, a fifteen-year-old Karen girl carrying the weight of her family’s expectations while dreaming of college.

THE AMERICANS is not a film about immigration policy. It’s a film that invites everyone into these people’s lives and asks if we can all agree about what happiness means for all of us—to connect to one another, to want the best for our children, and to have peace—and if we can all agree on that, we can try to get there together, instead of shutting each other out, and redefine the identity of what it means to be AMERICAN, an identity not based on race, heritage, or birthright, but based on an idea, an idea about the right for all humans to be happy.

Hyunsoo Moon

Credits

Directed, photographed and edited by

Hyunsoo Moon

Produced by

Brian Tessier, Hyunsoo Moon

Music by

Robert Lydecker

Executive producers for CAAM

Stephen Gong, Donald Young

Associate producer

Haejung Kim

Consulting editor

Alex MacKenzie

Co-executive producer and distribution

Center for Asian American Media

Production company

Anchor Pictures Inc.

Fiscal sponsor

International Documentary Association

Running time

91 minutes

Languages

English, Karen, Nuer

Country

United States, 2026