Eight prominent voices from across the Asian and Pacific diaspora sit down to talk identity, family, and belonging in The A List: 15 Stories from Asian and Pacific Diasporas, a 2026 documentary directed by Eugene Yi.
What is The A List: 15 Stories from Asian and Pacific Diasporas about?
The film gathers a group of well-known Asian and Pacific Islander figures, actors, activists, broadcasters, and athletes among them, and lets each one speak plainly about what it has meant to build a life and a career while carrying an identity that America has not always made room for. Rather than a single throughline, the documentary moves between these voices as a chorus: distinct careers, distinct backgrounds, and a shared thread of having to define, on their own terms, what being Asian in America looks like. The stories touch on setbacks tied to prejudice as much as on the wins that followed, presented without dramatization, mostly in the subjects' own words.
About the cast
Sandra Oh, Kumail Nanjiani, and Connie Chung bring decades of screen and broadcast recognition to the film, joined by chef and restaurateur Yia Vang, civil rights advocate Amanda Nguyen, DJ and producer DJ Rekha, competitive swimmer Schuyler Bailar, and Madelyn Yu. The range of professions is itself part of the film's point: the subjects share a diaspora experience while working in entirely different fields, from entertainment to sport to activism.
Context & significance
As an anthology-style documentary, The A List sits alongside a growing body of nonfiction work built around first-person testimony rather than narration, letting each subject's own account carry the film. At 84 minutes, it moves through its interviews at a steady clip, giving each voice room without overstaying any single segment. Eugene Yi's approach favors direct address over reenactment, keeping the focus on what each person says rather than how their story might be dramatized.
Watching The A List: 15 Stories from Asian and Pacific Diasporas on Ktime
The A List: 15 Stories from Asian and Pacific Diasporas streams on K-Time with a free account login, available dubbed into Persian or with Persian subtitles. K-Time's Farsi-language interface is built for the Iranian diaspora, and a documentary about navigating identity across borders and generations sits comfortably alongside the platform's wider catalog for viewers watching from outside Iran.