Collective Screening
They Became Myth

VOX invites you to a collective screening of the film program They Became Myth. Moving Image from Vietnam. The screening will be followed by an informal Q&A session with guest programmer, Mary Lou David.

Mary Lou David is a French curator working in the fields of video and experimental cinema. From 2018 to 2025, she was part of the curatorial team at Sàn Art, a nonprofit art center based in Ho Chi Minh City, known for its support of local and international artists as well as its strong commitment to critical discourse and experimental practices. She also co-curated and organized several editions of the Saigon Experimental Film Festival.

PROGRAM

Lena Bui
Kindred, 2021
07:38

Kindred reimagines the soul as a shifting collection of many beings, instead of a singular entity traveling through many cycles of reincarnation. Blending Taoist, Buddhist and Animist worldviews, this ever-shifting chimera-like spirit merges and disperses, moving through time and Southeast Asian landscapes, recounting what they’d once been or witnessed in a variety of languages, from Cham, Tamil, Javanese, Khmer, Vietnamese and Cantonese to English. The film begins and concludes with water, seen here as a conduit between worlds and states of being, embodying cycles of birth, decay and renewal.

Nguyen Trinh Thi
Letters from Panduranga, 2015
34:52

Presented as a letter exchange between a man and a woman, this essay film was prompted by the Vietnamese government’s plans to construct the country’s first two nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuận, formerly known as Panduranga. For almost two thousand years, this location has been the spiritual heart of the Cham Indigenous people, with these plans posing a threat to the survival of ancient Cham culture. At the border between documentary and fiction, Letters from Panduranga offers reflections on fieldwork, ethnography and the role of the artist. The film tackles the complex and ongoing legacies of colonialism, as well as central ideas of power and ideology in everyday life.

Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran
The Curator Ghost, 2024
17:50

In this experimental photo-montage film, a cyborg curator-agent recovers the archival traces of a significant Vietnamese exhibition abroad in 1960 and its curator, Nghiem Tham, who would later be murdered in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) in 1979. The uncanny relationship between the cyborg and the curator speaks not just to the entangled historical ties that bind modernist imaginations and contemporary art, but also to an emerging landscape of artificial intelligence where the world’s history becomes an expansive data set to serve national identities.

Thao Nguyen Phan
Becoming Alluvium, 2019
16:40

Divided into chapters, Becoming Alluvium begins with the story of two brothers forever bound by the Mekong River, drawing on the 2018 collapse of a hydroelectric dam in Laos that caused many deaths and displaced thousands. Accompanied by readings from Marguerite Duras’ L’Amant (The Lover), Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities) and a Khmer folktale, and enriched with both animated sequences and glimpses of industrial life, the film unfolds as a portrait of the Mekong River. Treating the moving image as a continuous current of reincarnation, the artist makes rebirth a central motif through which she explores the Mekong’s and Vietnam’s environmental and social transformations.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen
The Boat People, 2020
20:00

A group of children, led by a strong-willed and resourceful little girl, travel the seas and collect the stories of a world they never knew through objects that survived through time. Calling themselves The Boat People, the group carves wood replicas to try and piece together a history they have yet to understand as they navigate through the ruins of human civilization. They then burn them for reasons that have long been forgotten. Arriving at a place formerly known as Bataan, the children come in contact with the rich and layered histories embedded in the coast.
The film was shot at various landmarks in Bataan, including the Boat People Museum, which preserves records of the Philippines Refugee Processing Center, where about 300,000 Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian refugees were processed after the Vietnam War.

In addition to the screening, displayed on a monitor

Phan Anh
the most romantic walk, 2018
25:44

This experimental documentary depicts the stories of the artist’s late grandmother through his mother’s recollection, along with his attempt to recreate the walk he made in the hospital waiting room on her last day. This work is part of the Museum of the Mind project (2017–, ongoing), a half-real, half-fictional museum presenting Phan Anh’s personal archive of his grandmother, who worked as a paramedic during the Vietnam War. Found objects, artifacts and visual documentations are brought together to depict the bond between the two generations, and to distinguish the identities of two individuals whose beliefs and ideologies were shaped by distinctive geographical and political contexts.