In an effort to bring high quality films and programming to the community, Viet Film Fest annually hosts community days during the festival.
“Crossing Generations” In-Person Local OC High School Exclusive Free Screening, Friday 10/11 at 10 am and 12:45 pm with Q&A afterwards (US Virtual Edition) – Virtual At-Home Screening from October 5 to 20
- Viet Film Fest’s Artist Director, Eric Nong, has carefully curated a short film set specifically for the Vietnamese diaspora youth. It can be watched virtually (with purchase) starting October 5!
- In this globe-trotting set intended for high school/secondary school students (but also suitable for older audiences), each of these films finds their protagonists reckoning with significant changes to their lives in respect to their Vietnamese identity.
A Vietnamese exchange student encounters misperceptions and prejudice in his first days at a North Dakota private school in Mike – a departure from the glossy ideal that he imagines America to be. By contrast, Viv’s Silly Mango is a riot grrrl-infused dramedy that shows how close friends often form an inextricable part of an individual’s personal growth and self-realizations. Together, Mike and Viv’s Silly Mango both comment on peer pressure, for good and ill, and how one’s upbringing informs how they present themselves to others.
Phở is the interlude between this set’s two halves, a narrated montage as the generations of a Vietnamese French refugee family pass by – a gentle transition to films with more parental themes. The shadowy humidity of an early summer evening in Louisiana overhangs One Summer Night’s contradictions: a traditional Vietnamese responsibility to tend to our parents’ health and a parental desire to see their children succeed. No easy answers there. So too in the concluding film, Boat People. Boat People, which uses an ant metaphor to tell its story, is the result of the “sad silence” that has often followed many a second- and third-generation Vietnamese individual’s questions about why their elders left Vietnam.
Across generations and places, these films present how Vietnamese people the world over grapple with change through the lens of their past.
Free Screening Event Exclusive for Santa Ana Residents
- Friday, October 11th at 4 pm
- Free public screenings of the short film sets, “But Not for Me” and “Love, Actualized”. Valid proof of residency required.
- “But Not for Me”: When someone is denied something – whether it was “theirs” to begin with or not – how do they respond? Do they turn their energy against others or look inward? Technicians and Phở Succession offers their answers through their Vietnamese characters’ callings. In both, the Vietnamese protagonists confront an abrupt end to their sources of financial stability – the steady work of a nail salon threatened by new technology and the death of a patriarch who was an expert chef, respectively. Between those two films are Endorphins and Everything Belongs to You, which adopt more meditative, less structured approaches, as opposed to the plot-driven scenarios of the aforementioned works. Endorphins captures the wandering thoughts of a young man swimming laps as he recovers from a breakup; Everything Belongs to You, as a cinematic essay, asserts the director’s feelings of her German and Vietnamese identities and her conflicting sense of cultural belonging.
- “But Not for Me” concludes with two films of defiance. The penultimate film, Broken Being: Prequel, is an animated science-fiction piece involving a medieval Vietnamese man reclaiming his loved one from a futuristic menace. Far less violent but just as uncompromising is The Little Shopping Trolley, which sees the matriarch of a financially-strapped Vietnamese Canadian refugee family act in bad faith in order to take advantage of a grocery store’s advertised discount. Denials, whether of an antagonistic, intangible, or material manner, provoke a response. The tension of the responses seen across this set snap into place, ripe for reflection.
- “Love, Actualized”: How do you say “I love you” without actually saying it? “Love, Actualized” explores the many ways the Vietnamese diaspora – whether in front or behind the camera – express their love to one another, their home countries, or their own identities.
- Accidents and Emergencies and Spit of You explore family tensions and the struggle to connect during times of family strife and loss, whether those divisions separate children and parents, siblings, or in-laws. From the Dreh’s Um film workshop, both Home is Where The Star Fruits Taste Sour and Motherland examine the search for identity and belonging across different generations and cultures – between Germany and Vietnam, grandparents and grandchild. Mike and Infinity! highlight the racial tensions between staying true to oneself and adapting to external pressures. Even love may not overcome all amid a new social environment or the specter of political challenges
- Each film in “Love, Actualized” provides a unique lens on how we express and confront our deepest connections and personal choices. Love makes the situations found in these films all the more bearable.
