FAAIM First Thursday’s
AAPI Film Night:
The Auntie Sewing Squad Resistance Playbook

Directed by Valarie Soe [In-Person for Q&A!]

THE AUNTIE SEWING SQUAD RESISTANCE PLAYBOOK is a feature-length documentary that follows the Auntie Sewing Squad, a collective of mostly Asian American and BIPOC women volunteers who saved the world at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

October 22nd, 2026
6PM - Doors Open
6:30PM - Begin Program

Haibayo Cafe
1132 W Argyle St, Chicago, IL 60640

Admission is Free! (Donations Appreciated)

At the start of the COVID-19 crisis in March 2020 in the U.S., due to the Trump administration’s botched response to the pandemic, the bottom dropped out of the surgical facemask supply as healthcare workers scrambled for PPE. From this chaos the Auntie Sewing Squad emerged, when performance artist Kristina Wong created the Auntie Sewing Squad facebook group in mid-March 2020.

The Aunties came together with a mission: to protect vulnerable communities from COVID-19. This national network of hundreds of Aunties, Uncles, and non-binary volunteers turned their living rooms into "sweatshops," where they sewed and donated cloth facemasks to counter the US government's failure to provide protective gear for its people. 

The Auntie Sewing Squad grew from about two dozen crafty activists to a nationwide group of more than 800 members who sew for historically disenfranchised communities of color whose vulnerabilities have been exacerbated by COVID-19. For the Aunties, sewing and donating masks was not just about meeting a public health need—it was a way to address systemic inequities from their sewing machines, by openly discussing feminism, anti-racism, allyship, and destroying white supremacy. 

The film interweaves several different voices, elements, and points of view which, when seen as a whole, coalesce into a complete picture that emphasizes the Aunties’ non-hierarchical structure. The film’s collective aesthetic is a simple example of what solidarity can look like. 

As Sun Tze wrote, “On desperate ground, fight.” During the pandemic we were desperate ground in the battle against COVID-19, and the Aunties continued to fight, to save lives.