Nguyễn Trinh Thi

Biography

In 2005, having completed her third degree abroad, Nguyễn Trinh Thi returned to Vietnam. Independent filmmaking there was almost impossible: documentaries were made mainly by a state studio, on government commission, and audiences were used to equating documentary with propaganda.

She was born in Hanoi in 1973. In 1994 she graduated from Hanoi Foreign Studies College with a degree in Russian and English, then went to the United States: in 1999 she received a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Iowa, and in 2005 a master’s degree in Pacific international affairs from the University of California, San Diego. She also studied photography and ethnographic film.

After that she set about building what did not exist. In 2007 she founded the Hanoi Independent Documentary & Experimental Filmmakers Forum (Hi-DEFF), which held screenings of such films every two weeks. In 2009 she opened Hanoi DocLab, a centre for training and production in documentary film and video art. The space was found in the building of the Goethe Institute: under a cultural agreement, it was the only place with free access and no censorship. DocLab runs courses in shooting, editing, sound and screenwriting, weekly screenings with discussions, an editing lab for filmmakers and artists, and a public library. She taught there herself for the first three years, then stopped to concentrate on her own work. By her own account she had no ambitions to change Vietnamese cinema: “this is a very small effort.”

Her own work began with documentaries. “A Chungking Road Opening” (2005) and “Love Man Love Woman” (2007), the latter about the Hanoi spirit medium Master Luu Ngoc Duc and the Mother Goddess religion, whose communities offer a haven to many gay Vietnamese. She has said that it is not an ethnographic film: for her the heart of it is Luu Ngoc Duc himself, his speech full of quotations from literature, poetry and folk sayings, a kind of language that, in her words, is dying out.

In 2010–2013 came the series “Unsubtitled”, “Que faire” and “Solo for a Choir”. In it she returned to the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm affair, the suppressed literary movement of the 1950s and the only instance of widespread intellectual dissent in North Vietnam. Nineteen Hanoi artists from the circle of Nha San Studio faced the camera in turn, ate something of their choice and stated their name and what they had eaten. Individually these are a parody of the practice of self-criticism and interrogation, in which an artist must explain the meaning of his work unequivocally; together the chorus evokes a quiet protest against surveillance and intimidation.

“Song to the Front” (2011–2012) is made from the Vietnamese film “Bài ca ra trận”, shot in 1973 at the Vietnam Feature Film Studio. From a patriotic story about a half-blinded soldier who is determined to return to the front, she cut a five-minute abstraction of jump cuts and freeze frames set to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. For her, these young soldiers are the sacrificed pagans. In “Landscape Series #1” (2013) she gathered hundreds of photographs of unidentified people standing in a landscape and pointing at something that is not in the frame.

Her best-known work, “Letters from Panduranga” (2015), was made in Ninh Thuan province in southern Vietnam, the last surviving part of the ancient kingdom of Champa, conquered by Dai Viet in 1832. She went there on residencies in 2013–2015, through a network of scholars of Champa. The occasion was the decision to build Vietnam’s first nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuan, at the spiritual heart of the Cham land; there was almost no public discussion of the project in the country, and local people were not consulted. The film is built as an exchange of letters between two filmmakers. The first version, closer to an ordinary documentary, she disliked: it only pretended to be objective. What she said there seems accurate to me: artists have contradictory desires, to be engaged and at the same time to disappear.

Her films and video installations have been shown at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the CAPC in Bordeaux, the Lyon Biennale (2015), the biennales in Singapore and Jakarta (2013), ZKM in Karlsruhe, Tate Modern and the Oberhausen festival. In 2015–2016 she lived in Berlin on a DAAD residency. In 2021 she received the Han Nefkens Foundation award for moving-image work, and in 2024 the Prince Claus IMPACT Award; in the same year her work was shown at the 60th Venice Biennale in the group project “Disobedience Archive”.