This year, Viet Film Fest featured eleven short film sets spanning themes from “Phim Femme” that expands Vietnamese femininity with queer narratives, to “Ethe(real)” where supernatural forces and special effects transport Vietnamese protagonists and the audience to spiritual terrains where memories of the departed can linger a little longer, and much more.
We highlight a number of short films across these brilliantly curated sets. There’s still time to experience and celebrate Vietnamese storytelling and creativity through film—the virtual at-home screening of Viet Film Fest 2025 will run until October 19th.
We Were The Scenery, directed by Christopher Robert Radcliff
14:30 | United States, Philippines, Viet Nam | 2025
Featured in short film set “Remember My Forgotten Man”
We Were the Scenery centers the incredible story of Hoa Thi Lê and Hue Nguyen Che, two Vietnamese refugees who played extras in Apocalypse Now during its filming in the Philippines. The Hollywood blockbuster from 1979 has since captured the American imagination of Vietnam and its synonymity with war. Hoa and Hue are the parents of award-winning Vietnamese American poet Cathy Linh Che, and the 15-minute documentary is just one mode of storytelling the Che utilizes in her multimodal project of grappling with her parents’ experiences (Becoming Ghost, a finalist for the National Book Award this year, is Che’s exploration through poetry). We Were the Scenery is a work of restorative practice in the archive of US-centric and Hollywood’s versions of the Vietnam War, where South Vietnamese bodies are ever-present, but their voices muted.
What do the Vietnamese refugees have to say about Apocalypse Now? Hoa and Hue’s practicality as they discuss how they were brought into the film, and their candor before the camera as they share what they thought about the movie and its director Francis Coppola (“He ate mangos without peeling the skin!”, Hoa complains), make for surprisingly funny moments. There is no profuse refugee gratitude and indebtedness to America or awe about Hollywood in this story. The viewer watches Che’s parents calmly point out other extras as they rewatch Apocalypse Now, pausing the movie to give names to their fellow Vietnamese refugees and facts about them—an act that both reclaims narratives from the margin and shares film trivia. Also incorporated in the film are glimpses into the domestic life of Che’s parents (i.e. picking homegrown fruit in the yard) decades after the war, and old family videos of Che’s childhood that her father, as “filmmaker,” recorded for his beautiful family.
Since its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Short Film Jury Prize: Nonfiction, We Were the Scenery has been having a successful tour in the US and abroad. The film’s goal to complicate the ubiquitous claim that Apocalypse Now has had on the history of Vietnam and the history of film is all the more achievable with its global reach. When it comes to standing out at the Viet Film Fest, however, We Were the Scenery blends into the film catalog almost too well. Its remixing of clips from historical/Hollywood depictions of the war with scenes of present-day Vietnam, a shot of a tear-off calendar from the local Vietnamese supermarket hanging in a Vietnamese American home, and parents recounting their story to their adult child who is behind the camera—these elements are the recognizable ‘scenery’ of any diasporic Vietnamese oral history documentary that similarly strives to restore a missing piece in the archive and present Vietnamese refugees as more than just traumatized victims of war. Here is a film that embodies the spirit of Viet Film Fest and is restlessly sharing the treasure of Viet storytelling to a global audience.
Someone Special (Một người đặc biệt), directed by Alice Gervat
7:28 | France | 2024
Featured in short film sets “Let This Acceptance Take,” “We Who Are Making Waves,” and “Best Short Film Nominees”
Someone Special (Một người đặc biệt) is a 2D animated film by Alice Gervat, a young French creative of Vietnamese descent. Gervant graduated with a master’s degree in animation at École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and Someone Special is her graduation film. The film deals with questions of identity and culture: How does a second- or later-generation Vietnamese person… become Vietnamese? How can a younger person connect to their roots, especially when they can’t turn to family or community to teach them their culture? But Gervat takes a playful approach to the diasporic kid’s existential crisis by telling a modern-day love story that begins when French-Vietnamese girl Lisa meets Vietnamese international student Xuân on a dating app. Fans of young adult graphic novels and queer rom-coms like Heartstopper will adore the colorful art style and how digital youth culture is captured in this film.
The central dilemma of Someone Special is clear: Lisa has one week to learn Vietnamese before her first in-person date with Xuân, who she has been texting in Vietnamese for months using translating apps. Otherwise, Xuân will find out that she’s a fraud! The simple plot gives room for Gervat to expand and dramatize Lisa’s efforts to live and breathe Vietnamese language books, apps, and YouTube videos, which all get her audience laughing with empathy about how far we can go to impress our crushes.
What struck me is how Lisa cannot rely on family to access her heritage. Gervat gracefully addresses this with a brilliant frame where Lisa considers the “candidates” in her family who might help her learn Vietnamese, but dismisses them one by one: her uncle who came to France at age three has poor Vietnamese himself, another uncle is homophobic, her grandparents have passed away, and her own father, a Francophile, appears to have completely assimilated in the dominant culture. When family fails to preserve culture due to the circumstances of migration, at least the World Wide Web can help her recite the names of farm animals. Ultimately, the story is joyful: by the time the end credits roll, the popular music of young Vietnamese artist 52hz playing in the background, we see a photograph of Xuân and Lisa together at a beach in Vietnam. Such moments of carefree belonging are the fruits of both Lisa re-connecting with her heritage and of her lover Xuân sharing the culture she has grown up in.
As Eric Nong, artistic director of VFF, points out, this is a big year for animated films at Viet Film Fest. Ten animated shorts were accepted, most of which are playing as part of the short film set “Drawn to the Screen.” Of the six short films nominated for the Grand Jury Trống Đồng Award for Best Short Film, two are animated: Someone Special, and the animated oral history Xanh (2022, dir. Thị Đăng An Trần) from Germany. This speaks to the quality of the animated films at VFF this year. Someone Special is undoubtedly a fan favorite for viewers of all ages.
Thru The Wire, directed by An Nguyen
15:52 | United States | 2024
Featured in short film set “Let This Acceptance Take”
Thru the Wire is a short film shot in Vietnam that brings director An Nguyen’s childhood to the screen, as well as the era of flip phones and obsession with online rhythm games. Like Nguyen, who is now based in Los Angeles, a number of filmmakers featured at Viet Film Fest 2025, from Cú Nhảy – The Jump (2024, dir. Leo Kei Angelos) to Rooftop Lempicka (2024, dir. Hang Luong Nguyen), followed their sense of nostalgia and returned to Vietnam to film a story inspired by a childhood memory. Thru the Wire is a comedy that pokes fun at a Vietnamese teenager who may feel awkward in her own skin and greasy hair, but her everyday idleness with family and friends disappears the moment she logs onto her dance game. The game addict transforms into her extroverted, attractive avatar where her fellow gamers compliment her virtual sense of fashion and skill and shower her with online gifts.
The film’s cinematography and music capture the whimsical spirit of being a teenager. The film opens from the perspective of the main character on a bicycle, where the busy streets of Vietnam are captured through the fun distortions of a fish-eye lens, and the traffic noise is blocked out by her own music in her earbuds. Long shots of noisy urban Vietnam and scenes of how she (begrudgingly) interacts with her mother and younger sister at home starkly contrast with (and even interrupt) the flashy online world of the dance game where her and her friend’s attractive avatars move and chat with confidence. The film’s simplicity, including how it is shot with all-natural lighting, is its charm and greatest strength. The candidness and focus on a teenager’s everyday life in Southeast Asia recalls Thai director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s film Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy. Thru the Wire’s director An Nguyen also directed We Used to Take the Long Way Home (2025), another nostalgic short film shot in Vietnam and part of VFF 2025’s short film set “Where the Heart Settles.”
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.
