Zuhause ist dort, wo die Sternfrüchte sauer sind (“Quê hương là chùm khế chua” or “Home is where the star fruits taste sour”) is a 24-minute documentary directed by Huy Nguyen that begins with a Vietnamese German boy’s desire to grow closer to his parents who work tirelessly to make a living in Germany. Nguyen’s narration is a letter addressed to his parents. “Will I feel closer to you when I am with the people who raised you?” Nguyen wonders as he visits his grandparents in their home and records moments of their everyday life in Vietnam. As Nguyen bonds with his grandparents on this trip and initiates conversations about love in Vietnamese culture, he considers the emotional and physical distance that his parents face in their own relationship with their parents.
Nguyen is among the young Vietnamese German filmmakers who participated in Dreh’s Um, a one-year documentary-based workshop founded by Đức Ngô Ngọc in 2020. Dreh’s Um promotes the Vietnamese German perspective in Germany’s film industry through youth and cultural empowerment as well as skill sharing. Multiple shorts from this year’s Viet Film Fest—Everything Belongs to You, Motherland, and Temporary Living—were also produced by rising Vietnamese German creators professionally mentored by the Dreh’s Um community.
Zuhause ist dort, wo die Sternfrüchte sauer sind artfully documents how Nguyen seeks a richer understanding of love in his Vietnamese family. The film opens with a slow overhead shot of Huy and his grandparents holding hands in their bed, an intimate gesture set against comical background music because expressing love can be so unbearably awkward. With each aesthetically curated still shot of domestic life, we encounter love in the moments when his grandmother cuts his grandfather’s hair and prepares his food, and when the elderly couple bicker over small things. Love is in the way Nguyen asks his grandfather, who cannot no longer see the people around him well, to touch his face. Love is the hug he gives his grandmother after she confesses how much she regrets not spending more time with her parents before they passed, and how much she misses her children and their rare visits.
Watching Nguyen’s understanding of his parents’ love deepen as he empathizes with his grandparents, I recalled a section from Vietnamese Australian Andre Dao’s novel Anam where he meditates on his family’s “tenderness deficit,” or so his immature-self had once believed: “But that was just a repetition of the old colonial lie about the cold, calculating, inscrutable Oriental… My family are not loveless—far from it. If anything, they suffer from a surfeit of love, a superfluity that smothers tenderness in its cot.” And that “surfeit of love” in the Vietnamese family endures across generations and migration, despite, at times, the cultural challenges of recognizing it.
The documentary’s title is a variation of the familiar Vietnamese saying, “Quê hương là chùm khế ngọt”—home is where the star fruits tastes sweet. Back in the day, his grandmother explains, every family had a star fruit tree, so it became a symbol for one’s home. But she points out, with a bit of humor, that these star fruits in their family home are actually sour. The playful twist of “sweet” to “sour” adds whimsy and symbolism to Nguyen’s project, where reflections on love and intimacy are handled with a balance of lighthearted humor and a more vulnerable, cultural significance. While sweet star fruits are yellow and ripe, sour star fruits are green and not yet ripe. That Nguyen comes from a home of green, still maturing star fruits emphasizes how his views on love and family are still young and developing. As this generation of diaspora kids must continue to navigate across Vietnamese and Western languages of tenderness, Nguyen’s playful yet introspective film offers the comforting gift of visual language for the younger generation to feel seen and heard, and for the older generation to better understand what we don’t yet have the words for.
Zuhause ist dort, wo die Sternfrüchte sauer sind was included in Viet Film Fest 2024. Read more of our coverage here.
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.
