Tuan Andrew Nguyen

The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Matt Lucero

The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music is a visual and musical journey through the fantastical funeral traditions and rituals of south Vietnam.

The Boat People

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Gryshyll Reyes Ilarina, Jam Acuzar

Set in an unspecified future at the precarious edge of humanity’s possible extinction, "The Boat People" follows a group of children led by a strong-willed and resourceful little girl, who travel the seas and collect the stories of a world they never knew through objects that survived through time.

The Island

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Phạm Anh Khoa, Donika Do Tinh

The Island is a short film shot entirely on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast of Malaysia that became the largest and longest-operating refugee camp after the Vietnam War. The artist and his family were some of the 250,000 people who inhabited the tiny island between 1978 and 1991; it was once one of the most densely populated places in the world. After the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shuttered the camp in 1991, Pulau Bidong became overgrown by jungle, filled with crumbling monuments and relics. The film takes place in a dystopian future in which the last man on earth - having escaped forced repatriation to Vietnam - finds a United Nations scientists who has washed ashore after teh world’s last nuclear battle. By weaving together footage from Bidong’s past with a narrative set in its future, Nguyen questions the individual’s relationship to history, trauma, nationhood, and displacement.

We Were Lost in Our Country

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

The Ngurrara Canvas II is many things to many people. But to the Ngurrara people it is a map, made from memory, of a place where their ancestors lived for over 60,000 years. It is a direct connection to their land - a country where kartiya (non-Aboriginal people) could not live in, because the desert is an impossible environment without knowledge of how to hunt, gather, and find water. The canvas is a strong symbol of solidarity, and of resistance to the colonial project that attempted to decimate the Ngurrara’s connection to their land - now known generically as the Great Sandy Desert. We Were Lost in Our Country explores questions of personal agency, inherited trauma, and intergenerational transmission, through a conversation among ancestors and descendants. As the voices of the young find their bearings and make their mark on the words of their ancestors, Tuan Andrew Nguyen accesses a past-and-present history of the canvas - a history of displaced memory and of its recreation.

My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Told through the point-of-view of the wandering spirit of the last Javan rhino that was poached in the jungles of Vietnam in 2010, the film takes us through a complex structure of narratives and visuals, both gruesome and beautiful, real and mythological, that have built and upheld certain Vietnamese traditions. From Chinese colonialism and its assertion through the practice of medicine, to French colonialism and their obsession with trophy kills, and throughout the Vietnam war, the animals tell a different side to the story.