Rumi wrote “keep your eyes on the bandaged place; that is where the light enters you.” This hourlong documentary features three Asian American men in mid- to later-life: Ravi Chandra, Truong Tran, and QiRe Ching. They are all artists in one or more media, two are psychotherapists, and all have been affected by AIDS and the twin pandemics of COVID and more visibly surfacing wounds of racial trauma. Their identities ‘don’t fit’ in significant ways, and so expression and relationship have become powerful affirmations. In poetry, reflection and conversation, their odysseys of alienation, intransigence, creativity and repair bring the viewer to the great depth needed in our fraught times. This documentary illuminates the wounds they carry, and showcases the light generated by staying close to vulnerability with insight, compassion, and relationship in the midst of suffering and loss. Viewers are opened to a space of grief, rage and resolve. We rarely see Asian American men of these ages on film, speaking candidly. “The Bandaged Place” is an antidote to our cultural blindness for diverse identities, and our unwillingness to hear men’s insights born of vulnerability. From the margins comes a new vision for how society might better center itself for the road ahead.