In 'Death of a Shaman', a young mien woman from Sacramento, Fahm Saeyang responds to her father's unsettled life and death by taking a reverse journey to examine the heartbreaking path he took from respectability to hopelessness-and from Southeast Asia to America-in a heartfelt personal mission to understand his tragic story.

This dual journey helps 'Death of a Shaman' examine with painful honesty how Fahm's Mien immigrant family suffered through a 20 year ordeal of poverty, racism, religions, drugs, jail, and the murder of a family member.

It is a chronicle of a darker side of the pursuit of the American dream that affected many of the 40,000 Mien who came from a primitive life in the mountains of Southeast Asia to America. 'Death of a Shaman' is also a moving account of Fahm's need to understand her father's pain, and a desire to figure out what will placate his troubled spirit and her own.