Watching the films of “To Our Parents, With Love” feels a lot like stepping inside the homes that your Vietnamese friends grew up in. You’re fawning over your friend’s baby pictures on the refrigerator and getting glimpses of their parents’ younger years. Although the kitchen is cluttered, all the essential Vietnamese seasonings are within reach, and fresh vegetables and fruits in the backyard await to be picked. You could point to where your family hangs that same Chinese-Vietnamese daily tear-off calendar in the living room, and you know there’s anything but cookies in that blue Royal Dansk tin on the table.
The feeling of childhood nostalgia is fleeting. You and your friends are much older now, and so are their parents.
“To Our Parents, With Love” is one of eight short film sets curated by this year’s Viet Film Festival artistic director Eric Nong and his team. This collection includes six family stories, each inspired by the Vietnamese film directors, producers, and actors’ relationships with their parents as they grew up in the United States and Canada. These short films lean into what lingers from these childhood memories and places as the child becomes an adult, as the parent ages and declines in health. The adult child continues to “grow up” as they clumsily express love for the parent through Vietglish, earnest attempts to fulfill what they guess their parents want, and confrontations of personal shame and guilt for falling short of expectations. When feelings of shame, guilt, confusion, and resentment of fulfilling filial duties become overwhelming, how does love between the Vietnamese parent and child evolve and endure?
In Coconut (2023, dir. Carthy Ngo), a Vietnamese Canadian daughter’s efforts to prepare fresh coconut juice for her sick father signify how earnest and consistent desire to connect with a parent, however clumsy or imperfect, can be tenderly received. As the daughter (UE Tran) attempts to chop a coconut herself after studying an internet stranger’s tutorial, Ngo reverses the parent-child roles in the trope of cut fruit. The daughter also demonstrates how the children of immigrants can resourcefully graft some of our parents’ fond childhood memories from the homeland onto the present-day, allowing the precious experience of enjoying fresh coconut juice to survive the migratory journey. In my favorite scene, we see the entire living room where her father (Minh Nguyen) is resting, while the daughter’s consistent coconut chopping resounds from the kitchen off-screen, her act of love echoing throughout the house. Chopping is messy, and Coconut becomes a beautiful metaphor for the other characters in this film set who also stumble their way through expressing their love for their parents.
The daughter and father in Coconut joke around with ease as she looks after him, but other parent-child relationships in the film set are anxious and hesitant, shrouded in a child’s guilt and shame as they decipher what their parents want from them, and decide whether to suppress or follow their personal desires. Keone (Topher Ngo) from Lifeline (2024, dir. Justin Hung Nguyen) is a successful musician on tour, but he carries the emotional baggage of loneliness and guilt that comes with leaving his familial responsibilities behind to pursue music. The film features an original song by Topher Ngo, as Keone soulfully sings about feeling lost, yearning for someone to “walk with me” because he “lost the boy I once knew” – perhaps a more carefree version of himself, instead of one who constantly feels like a bad son for putting his passion first. The film’s deliberately slow beginning delays Keone’s dreaded visit to his sick grandmother’s room – cold, stale, suffocating. It is not easy for Keone or the viewer to bear the heavy presence of a sick grandmother and a father so stoic and emotionless in his grief. He hesitates to put a consoling hand on his father’s shoulder, as though scared that he no longer has the right to. But as his father (Billinjer Tran) partially opens up and Keone is pushed to make a decision, a familial warmth transforms his grandmother’s room, mending Keone’s connection with his family in the moment, even when he cannot be a part of their everyday life.
One Summer Night (2023, dir. Long Lê) digs deeper into what being a “good son” means. Nominated for Best Short, One Summer Night shines in its rich characterization of two brothers and their different approaches to honoring their father, who is severely ill. Tom Dang is nominated for Best Actor for his stunning delivery of the character Huy, a volatile eldest brother who lightly teases his younger brother Hai (David Vi Hoàng) at one moment, then coldly close himself off in the next, until his next cigarette break can numb him back into being a dutiful son. In contrast to Huy’s resigned gaze is the idealistic Hai, dressed in his best for his graduation ceremony. What was once Hai’s foolproof plan to make Ba (Joseph Hiếu) proud – get into a top college, thank Ba in his graduation speech – becomes pointless and even a source of guilt for Hai, when Ba becomes too ill to attend his graduation and laments that Stanford is too far from their home in Louisiana. Confused and heartbroken by Ba’s reaction, Hai finds a reason to clash with Huy. During the film’s emotional climax, Hai and Huy resentfully distort each other’s intentions for studying hard or not having a job, accusing one another of being selfish and not doing enough for the family. One Summer Night’s cinematography heightens the brothers’ differences (from character placement to their light/dark outfits) then artfully melds them (by the father’s bedside, their figures are warmly backlit as one silhouette). The film is about the brothers’ love for their father as much as it is about their love for each other. In the film’s bittersweet conclusion, it is through his brother Huy that Hai finally receives the words of love and pride that he had always wanted to hear from their father.
In Newspapers (2024, dir. Vu Hoang), a Vietnamese boy who grows up in 1990s America has turned to extremes in his search for what it means to be a good son. On the run from the police, Binh (David Vi Hoàng) finds a moment in the midst of violence to call his mother (Cát Ly) to tell her he loves her. In between pained gasps for air, Binh reminisces about the early morning newspaper deliveries he used to make with his mother. But there are moments when he sternly lapses into anger, with bitter outbursts of “These people don’t accept us!” and “It wasn’t easy growing up here.” Tonight is the consequence of how he coped with the difficulty of assimilation in 90s America, as Newspapers sheds light on a lesser told narrative of 1.5 generation youth who joined the local Asian gang for the promise of protection against racism, for family and brotherhood, and to make money. As a second-generation Vietnamese American, I only learn of uncles and cousins who hung out with “the bad crowd” in stories told by hushed voices at family gatherings, or briefly explored in Andrew Lam’s essay “Love, Money, Prison, Sin, Revenge” about the four Vietnamese gunmen in the 1991 Sacramento hostage crisis, or through characters like Tuấn and the Southern Boyz in Eric Nguyen’s 2019 novel Things We Lost to the Water.* Through seamless flashbacks and David Vi Hoang’s moving performance, Newspapers delicately holds close a boy calloused by racist realities, who finds comfort in his mother’s voice. This emotional, tender film is nominated for Best Short, and David Vi Hoàng is a nominee for Best Actor for his role of Binh.
In contrast to the warm tones of the other films in “To Our Parents, With Love,” Repeat (2020, dir. Ly Bolia) voids any emotional connection the viewer could have with Bolia’s mother, who is declining from dementia in her American home. The camera never gets too close to her, the somber tone of traditional Vietnamese instruments displaces her in a different generation and country, and her staticky, troubled voice from constant phone calls with Bolia is a disconcerting presence throughout the film. Bolia is at a later life stage than the other sons and daughters in this film collection, and his narration conveys how draining and unnatural it feels for the child to take care of the parent, despite it being a filial duty. There is something disturbing, perhaps infantilizing, in the way the narrator forces his mother to write out on the fridge the options she has for moving in with his siblings so they can better support her; but she stubbornly hangs onto her independence and never makes a decision, just repeatedly tells her son that she is depressed and what should she do. Whereas the father in Coconut straightforwardly tells his daughter what he wants after some probing, giving the daughter a chance to make him happy, the mother in Repeat is unable to. Repeat is a claustrophobic film sympathetic to a son who does not know if there is anything more he can do to help his mother while protecting his peace.
Mẹ Con (2023, dir. Melanie Dang Ho) felt like an experimental antithesis to Repeat. The mother’s laughter as she recounts light-hearted stories about her own mother during her childhood in Vietnam, over clips of tending to her home garden in Florida, draw us emotionally closer to her. As our connection deepens, we learn that the grandmother cried everyday after the mother left for America, and eventually became blind. Mẹ Con is attuned to our parents’ growing pains as our grandparent’s child, especially for immigrant parents who had to leave their parents behind in Vietnam. Moreover, Mẹ Con is an archival and multimedia project that plays with the interconnectedness of sounds and patterns in the mother’s daily motions of gardening and cooking. As my own family is from central Vietnam, it felt especially intimate to hear the mother’s Huế dialect and see her making banh náºm, so specific to Huế cuisine.
These six films feel cathartic for the child of immigrants. These stories offer us a way to describe the complicated relationships we have with our parents, without reducing them to emotionless, traumatized tiger parents or insisting they still love us through cut fruit narratives. Asian and Vietnamese parents and children are complicated people – they are funny even in grief, possess a strong sense to do right by their loved ones, have moments when they feel strong, and times when they get emotional. As difficult as it is to see our parents weak and in pain, the characters of “To Our Parents, With Love” set ask us to be present, to admit the rawness of heartbreak and hurt in our hearts, and, when we’re ready, to give ourselves grace as our parents’ children.
Check out “To Our Parents, With Love” as well as other short film sets and features virtually at Viet Film Fest 2024 until October 20!
*Eric Nguyen is the Editor in Chief of diaCRITICS.
Cathy Duong co-hosts cà phê book club, a monthly book club that meets in coffee shops across north Orange County, CA (IG: @caphebookclub). She enjoys traveling to Little Saigons, playing V-pop on her ukulele, and analyzing diasporic Viet literature.
