An eye roll is the proper response, along with - in the online version of this review - a link to the New York Times article on the trial's outcome, which Mr Sung is shown reading in the film. The filmmakers have asked that the trial's verdict, announced in June 2015, be withheld from reviews to preserve suspense. (The flip side of the banks that were too big to fail, the journalist Matt Taibbi says in the film, is this bank, which was "small enough to jail".) The documentary also shows how Abacus had played an important role as a neighbourhood banker in an immigrant community. The prosecution was, in its view, an arrogant waste of resources and possibly an act of scapegoating. The film persuasively argues that any fraud at Abacus occurred at a low level, and that the bank dealt with it swiftly and properly. The sisters have great charisma on screen, although their mother, Hwei Lin Sung, earns the biggest smiles. Of Mr Sung's four daughters, three were trained as lawyers - including Jill Sung, the bank's chief executive, and Vera Sung, a director of the bank - and another had even worked in the district attorney's office that prosecuted the case.
#ABACUS FEDERAL SAVINGS BANK MORTGAGE STATEMENT MOVIE#
The movie makes no secret of its affection for the Sung family, which was well equipped professionally, if not financially, for an expensive legal battle. In a moment that seems unintentionally revealing, he adds: "I felt that our handling of the bank was consistent with how we would have handled the bank if we were investigating a bank that serviced a South American community or the Indian community."Īt least he agreed to be interviewed, which isn't always the case in documentaries that fall so firmly on one side of a case. Was the government giving a pass to big fish and picking on a small one - perhaps with a tinge of racism in its motives? Cyrus Vance Jr, the district attorney who oversaw the case, called the accusations of cultural bias "entirely misplaced and entirely wrong". Sean Lyness/PBS DistributionĪbacus was, a title card at the end asserts, "the only US bank indicted for mortgage fraud related to the 2008 crisis". Thomas Sung, the founder of Abacus Federal Savings Bank, in the documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. The bank became a community hub, but in 2012, the Manhattan district attorney's office charged it with mortgage fraud, also indicting 19 of its former employees. His crowd-pleasing new documentary, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, doesn't aspire to the same scale as those films, but like them, it's a kind of stealth home movie: a portrait of two generations of an immigrant family in the United States.īorn in Shanghai, Thomas Sung founded the Abacus Federal Savings Bank in Chinatown in 1984, hoping to make it easier for Chinese immigrants to get loans.
The veteran documentary director Steve James is best known for Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters, two expansive Chicago films that on the surface concerned basketball and violent crime but had much to say about the American dream and the potential for self-invention.
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