By Elmer Ploetz
Editor-in-chief

Elizabeth Ai’s documentary “New Wave” is nominally about music, specifically a brand of Euro disco that came out of the Vietnamese ex-patriate community in the 1980s. But it’s really about a lot more than that.

Ai’s film, which will be showing Thursday night at Hallwalls as part of the Buffalo International Film Festival, follows her journey as she looks back at the music scene that gave young Vietnamese refugees an escape from the challenges facing them in their day-to-day lives in the new homes in the United States.

Ai, who witnessed the scene as a child watching her older relatives, and Producer Rachel Sine will be in attendance at the screening.

It’s a high quality, big budget (for a documentary) film that does everything right, combining archival footage, subtle reenactments and tight editing.

But, as with most good documentaries, the key is Ai’s characters. The story is built around Lynda Trang Đài (the “Vietnamese Madonna”), Ian “DJ BPM” Nguyen and … Ai herself. But the unseen (for the most part) characters are their parents, the people who left behind their homeland in 1975 to start their lives over in a strange land.

The young Vietnamese-Americans discovered their New Wave as a way to forge their own identities and rebel in their own way.

The first two-thirds of the film will tell you all you need to know to get a big picture of what Vietnamese New Wave was about (think ’80s synth pop musically), then the final third triggers the feels. For Ai, the story turns personal. Families can be complex, whether it’s nuclear families, extended families or families found in a music scene.