Young Vietnamese filmmakers are rewriting the diaspora story
A new wave of short films and features is moving past the refugee narrative to tell quieter, weirder, more specific stories.
By Kim Le · July 14, 2025 · 5 min read
For years, film festival programmers say, Vietnamese diaspora stories tended to arrive in one of two forms: war-and-escape narratives set in the past, or straightforward assimilation dramas about the child of immigrants finding themselves. A newer crop of filmmakers, many in their twenties and thirties, are pointedly avoiding both.
"I didn't want to make another boat story," said director Vy Tran, whose short film about a phở restaurant inheriting a karaoke machine from a dead uncle played at three festivals last year. "There's so much everyday weirdness and tenderness in just being a Vietnamese family in a random American suburb. That's the movie I wanted to see."
That instinct is showing up across a handful of recent projects: a mockumentary about a nail salon's group chat, a slow character study about a father who communicates almost entirely through fixing things around the house, a horror short that uses a family ancestor altar as its central image. Festival programmers say submissions in this vein have noticeably increased over the past three years.
Funding remains the persistent obstacle — most of these projects are self-financed shorts, made on favors and weekend availability. But several filmmakers in this loose cohort have started an informal group chat of their own, trading equipment, crew recommendations, and unsolicited notes on each other's cuts. "None of us can afford film school anymore," Tran said. "So we're just each other's film school now."