Twenty years ago, if you had told Orange County movie enthusiasts Ysa Le and Tram Le (no relation) that their local film festival would one day feature an Oscar-nominated Best International Feature Film (1993’s The Scent of Green Papaya, from director Tran Anh Hung) and a late-’80s TV heartthrob (21 Jump Street’s Dustin Nguyen), they would have laughed in your face.
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In 2003, the two cofounders of Viet Film Fest (formerly the Vietnamese International Film Festival) were experienced arts-events organizers who loved movies and recognized the need for Vietnamese stories told by Vietnamese people. Up until that point, for mainstream U.S. audiences, Vietnam and Vietnamese people had been defined by directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, and Stanley Kubrick or, worse, by Sylvester Stallone. All are respected filmmakers, but with minimal (verging on zero) nuance, each has attempted to depict Vietnamese people living through their own country’s civil war and its aftermath.
But the two organizers had one major problem: they had no experience throwing a film festival. “Worst-case scenario, we were going to hold it in Ysa’s garage,” says Tram Le with a laugh. “There’s a saying in Vietnamese that goes, ‘The deaf aren’t afraid of gunshots.’ We didn’t know what we didn’t know. We just knew we wanted to tell our stories authentically.”
The first VFF was not held in a garage, premiering instead at UC Irvine in the fall of 2003. Afterward, recalls Ysa Le with an embarrassed smile, “we just said goodbye to the audience. We couldn’t guarantee another one, so we didn’t invite anyone back.” Twenty years later, the festival has not only survived but grown, much like the Vietnamese American community that nurtured it.
The movie festival that was almost shown on a garage door has played to thousands of audience members, screened over 500 films (features and shorts), and launched the careers of many directors, actors, and crew members. This year, VFF will be held over two weekends, from September 30 to October 7, at the Frida Cinema in Santa Ana and with 11 features and 44 shorts.
The range and genres of the movies are as diverse as the filmmakers. In the past, selections have come from all over the United States and over a dozen countries, including France, Germany, Australia, and Canada. According to VFF’s call for submissions, one of the few criteria for selection is that a film be made by “persons of Vietnamese descent living anywhere around the world or [are] productions by anyone about Vietnamese people or culture.”
One of the featured films this year is The Accidental Getaway Driver, directed by Sing J. Lee, who won Best Director at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for it. The movie is based on a true story, as documented in a 2017 GQ article by Paul Kix, about the Orange County prison escape of three inmates who then kidnap an elderly Vietnamese taxi driver. Dustin Nguyen plays Tay, the complicated kidnapper who builds an unlikely relationship with Long Ma, the septuagenarian driver, played by Hiep Tran Nghia.
“Their relationship is beautiful, unexpected, and cross-generational,” says Eric Nong, VFF’s artistic director. “Two men discover they have shared struggles, the major one being they are both displaced from their families.”
Other films of note at this year’s VFF include Mye Hoang’s documentary Cat Daddies, which chronicles cat adoptions by men during the COVID pandemic; Muoi: The Curse Returns, Hang Trinh’s debut horror feature about an enigmatic painting found in an old French villa in Vietnam; and Thanh Tan’s Refuge After War, a documentary that parallels the Vietnamese postwar refugee experience with that of more-recent Afghan refugees.
Over the years, I’ve attended VFF a number of times as an audience member. I’ve bopped my head to the breakdancing of Saigon Electric, laughed at the struggle for athletic success in Australian rules rugby in Footy Legends, and was moved to tears from the ex-soldier experience depicted in Journey from the Fall.
“The audience needs art in their busy lives. Life without art, culture, and music is empty. VFF brings people together to meet, to discuss, and to celebrate,” says legendary Vietnamese actor Kieu Chinh (M*A*S*H, The Joy Luck Club, and probably a hundred other credits in her 70-year career). “But a filmmaker, an actor needs an audience too. We cannot exist without an audience. We need each other.”
The fest also serves as a networking event for the filmmakers and actors, like producer Jenni Trang Le, who says that the 2005 VFF changed her life. It was there that she met The Rebel director Charlie Nguyen, who asked her to be his first assistant director, despite her lack of experience. Le moved to Vietnam, where she became fluent in Vietnamese and worked in the film industry from 2005 to 2022.
Says director Ham Tran, “VFF launched my career. I debuted The Anniversary there, and that’s how I met my investors for Journey from the Fall.” But most important, Tran adds, at VFF, “it’s not just about your movie. It’s about the community. We build collaborations. We find other filmmakers. We get inspired by each other’s energy.”
Last year, I felt comfortable enough with the pandemic to attend the opening night of VFF 2022 in person with my two sons, ages 7 and 11 at the time. We saw Tran’s endearing kids’ movie Maika, the story of an alien space girl who lands on earth and befriends a boy in Vietnam.
Set in present-day Vietnam, Maika doesn’t depict a war or retell the refugee experience. As important as those things are to Vietnamese Americans, they don’t define us as people anymore. In fact, they never did. Now we have the movies to prove it.•
Check out the schedule for the Viet Film Fest here.
Ky-Phong Tran and his family fled to the United States at the end of the Vietnam War. A Jack Hazard Fellow, a Bread Loaf Scholar, and a Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation Scholar, he has been named a finalist in short fiction contests by Narrative magazine and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Raised on the Northside of Long Beach, he writes about the refugee experience, basketball, and the underbelly of American life.
