Living the American dream in China’s Wild West: Award-Winning Documentary by SCMS Faculty Adam Smith

Americaville, the first solo-feature film of Adam Smith, recently premiered at the 2020 Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF).

Based on the community living in a replica of the Wyoming town of Jackson Hole, Americaville offers a glimpse of Chinese people attempting to live the American dream two hours north of Beijing. Adam Smith is an award-winning filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Multimedia in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University. His work focuses on the expression of identity in urban China.

“I am very interested by American culture and Chinese culture. And this was a very unique place where the two cultures are colliding,” Smith said in an interview on the red carpet at the SBIFF.

Amidst the pandemic, Americaville has managed to screen across the US at the virtual screenings of film festivals, such as the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival and the Salem Film Festival. The film has also been screened in-person in European countries including Vienna, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, and Lund. In Sweden, Americaville was awarded with the “Best Feature Documentary” award at the Architecture Film Festival. The documentary was also presented in the original town of Jackson Hole, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Jackson Hole Center for the Arts. 

Smith has been invited to talk about the film in academic institutions such as the US-China Institute at USC, the Long Institute at UC Irvine, and the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA.

Jackson Hole, China, started as a real estate project, where residents could experience living in the American “Wild West.” But it has evolved to represent a promise to live a version of the American dream. “In Jackson Hole (China), they (residents) see embodied not only tangible things that they want,” Smith said in an interview on the podcast  What's Your Why? “..They see an expression of wealth, they see freedom, they see happiness, the idea of pursuit to happiness, which is quite a new idea to China.” 

The documentary follows the life of Annie Lui who moves to Jackson Hole, China, to pursue happiness, freedom, romance, and spiritual fulfillment. But this pursuit has not been welcomed by the Chinese nationalists.  “There is this new form of nationalism in China that deems some foreign influences as unpatriotic, and Jackson Hole, China, and its inhabitants were even described in some articles by state media as traitors to China,” said Smith  

Americaville covers the struggles of this community as they respond to criticism and find ways to integrate the elements of Chinese culture into this American-style town. The documentary is Smith’s second feature film shot in China. 

After graduating from Stanford University, he co-directed his first feature documentary, Land of Many Palaces (2015), based on China’s largest ghost city- Ordos. Throughout his 20s, Smith lived in both China and the US.  While attending college in the U.S., he started working with Chinese filmmakers and journalists. He is currently exploring television broadcast opportunities throughout the US and the world, as well as distributing the film on a streaming service.