Oscar-nominated

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail tells true story about Chinese immigrants.

When the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominees for its 90th Oscar awards to be given on March 4, their lineup for Best Documentary Feature included, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.

It's a film about a tiny Chinese-American community bank indicted for fraud during the 2008 US mortgage crisis that triggered a financial crisis worldwide.

The Academy Award-winning director, Steve James, best known for Hoop Dreams, told Xinhua in a recent exclusive interview, "I gravitated toward documentaries because I wanted to tell stories, but I wanted to tell true stories about people in pivotal situations, at a crossroads in their lives. This is such a story."

This small story has had big impact. It won Best Documentary from the Critics Choice and the National Board of Review Awards. Movie City News called it "one of the best documentaries in recent years," while The Hollywood Reporter asserted it was "both an affirmation and an indictment of the American dream."

In 2012, in the aftermath of the crippling 2008 mortgage crisis that sent the United States and world economies into a devastating tailspin for half a decade, New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance filed multiple charges of fraud against Abacus Federal Savings Bank, a small, privately-owned bank that served New York's Chinatown community.

The ordeal began when Jill Sung, CEO of the bank founded by her father, Thomas Sung, noticed an anomaly in the bank's loan department and discovered one of the bank's lower-level employees had been falsifying mortgage applications.

Did they cover it up and skate with a simple fine like all the big banks did? No. They immediately reported it to the banking authorities and fired the employee. What happened next is what director James calls, "a wrongful persecution" and "an unequal application of justice."

Despite Sung's blowing the whistle on their employee's illicit activities and firing him the same day it was discovered, the bank itself became the target of a federal investigation into mortgage fraud.

"Big banks that engaged in damaging actions that caused so many people to lose their life savings and their homes were not punished. Yet here is a small community bank doing what banks are supposed to do - lend to their community - and this is the only one indicted," said James.

"That was mind-boggling to me," said the film's producer, Mark Mitten. "Because no other bank had been indicted, and knowing it was just a small community bank, the 2651st largest bank in America, with one of the lowest default rates on record, it was a head-scratcher. Why them?"

During the early 2000s, in the largely unregulated subprime mortgage industry, the biggest banks in America, like Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Chase, Lehman Brothers, and many others, provided billions in risky mortgages to millions of unqualified applicants unable to afford them.

Bitter controversy arose when the US government determined that the multimillion dollar banks were indeed "too big to fail". And some would complain, too big to indict, when not a single financial institution was brought to justice.

"Going after a big bank would have been a formidable undertaking for the DA's (district attorney's) office, and probably wouldn't even have come to trial yet," James said.