Latest news with #VietnameseDiaspora
Yahoo
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
First Czech-Viet Feature ‘Summer School, 2001' and Anime Series: Duzan Duong Is Everywhere at KVIFF
The Czech Republic has the third-largest Vietnamese diaspora in Europe, only behind Germany and France. In fact, the Vietnamese make up the third-largest ethnic minority in the country after Slovaks and Ukrainians. Now, this community is buzzing about its chance to be represented and make its presence felt on the silver screen. After all, Tuesday, July 8, marks the world premiere of Dužan Duong's Summer School, 2001 in the Special Screenings program of the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF). Or as KVIFF put it: 'The long-awaited first Czech-Viet feature is finally here! This authentic portrayal of a community that has become an organic part of modern Czech history is brought to us courtesy of Dužan Duong, a standout, exceptionally talented representative of the first Vietnamese generation to grow up in the Czech Republic.' More from The Hollywood Reporter 'When a River Becomes the Sea': An Archaeologist Digs Deep to Uncover and Confront Sexual Trauma AI Brings Neurological Problems in Near-Future Brazil in 'Future Future' (Exclusive Karlovy Vary Teaser) Agnieszka Holland on Her Kafka Film 'Franz' and Its Themes, Such as "Dangers of Totalitarian Society" Here is a synopsis of the movie: 'The third millennium has hardly begun, and 17-year-old Kien with his crazy red hair returns to his family and their market stall in Cheb after 10 years spent in Vietnam. However, instead of the warm welcome he had anticipated, he finds an estranged father, a careworn mother, and a younger brother who doesn't cut him any slack.' Prague-based Duong, 34, wrote the screenplay for his feature directorial debut with Jan Smutný and Lukáš Kokeš. Duong and Kokeš are the producers of the movie. Its cast includes Đoàn Hoàng Anh, Lê Quỳnh Lan, Tô Tiến Tài, Bùi Thế Duong, Ngô Xuân Thắng, and Nguyễn Dũng. 'Told with lightness and wit, this story about cross-generational conflict and much else besides is an affectionate and bold milestone in the debate on cultural identity,' the KVIFF website touts. Ahead of the world premiere of Summer School, 2001, Duong talked to THR about the inspiration for the film, showcasing the Vietnamese experience in the Czech Republic to a wider audience, pulling double duty in Karlovy Vary by also pitching an anime series idea, and what else he wants to do next. Can you maybe share your family's story and how your parents came to the Czech Republic? My parents met in Germany during the Cold War. They were sent from Vietnam to Germany to work. They met in a factory. And they conceived me there. When that era ended, they had to go back to Vietnam. So I was born in Vietnam. After three, four years, we went from Vietnam to the Czech Republic. And this is the story of most of the Vietnamese community in the Czech Republic. We have similar paths. In , a young man returns to his family in the Czech Republic after years back in Vietnam. Can you talk about the role identity plays in the film? When I was just a small kid, my parents had to go to this marketplace to earn money, because they had some debts in Vietnam. Because we went from Vietnam to the Czech Republic, they had to loan some money. So I had to grow up with a Czech nanny and Czech granddad, actually, and they were my substitute parents for a very long time. My parents had to work a lot during my childhood. So I was growing up with this old Czech couple. They made me the Czech person I am. They taught me the culture and everything. That's the reason I feel somehow split in my personality – being Czech or Vietnamese. It's very hard to be Vietnamese when you don't get to meet your parents in everyday situations and spend most of your time with Czech people. So that's the first step in my story about this broken relationship with one's parents. The members of the family in the film seem to experience this mix of emotions, including duty, respect, and love. Talk a bit about the many layers of these relationships in the film and how you approached them. To be honest, it's just my family and many other Vietnamese families packed into one film. We like to call it 'auto-fiction,' because it all comes from the real world of the Vietnamese community in the Czech Republic. So most of it is based on reality. But we added some drama for the film. Can I ask how difficult it was to finance the film? It actually wasn't that hard, because we have a production company, and we specialize in shorts and commercials. So we had a base of people and didn't need that much of money. We could rely on a lot of people with good intentions and good hearts who wanted to make this, I would say, milestone in Czech cinema. This kind of Vietnamese film from the Czech Republic has never been done before. So we were very lucky to be at the beginning of what will hopefully be this new wave. What feedback have you received from the Vietnamese community in the country before people have even seen the film? What do they think of the idea that there will be a feature about their experience? Oh, they love it. I really feel such huge support from the community. It's not usual for a debut film to be hyped this much. The power of community! The film hasn't premiered yet, so I'm quite nervous about it. I don't want to make anybody unhappy when they finish watching the film. The stakes are high for us. Will your family see the movie?Yeah, most of my family will see it for the first time, wow. And I'm really looking forward to seeing their faces. In our family, and in general in Vietnamese families, communication is not the biggest thing. Our Vietnamese parents don't know the Czech language that well. So this film is a way for me to tell them everything I've been through in my whole life. And I noticed during the shoot that many aspects of the film happen to be universal, because many young people from the cast were going through similar problems. Dužan Duong, Courtesy of KVIFF How long did you work on the movie? It was really encouraging for me to finish the film after eight years. We were in the writing room for quite a while – five, six years. And once we got the first funding, I didn't want to wait for anything. I went all in and persuaded the other producers that we needed to make it now, because I found a good cast, and its members were growing up. So if we had been waiting for another year, I would have had to find other actors. Who are the people in the cast? Are they professional actors, and how did you find them? The young boy in the family is from my neighborhood. I've known him since he was little. His family runs the grocery store right down from my apartment. He was always this communicative young boy who wanted to have fun. He reminded me of me a little bit, so I thought I'm going to cast him. I just went by heart. I didn't want to have many options. Once I felt he was the right person, I went for him. Most of the actors are first-time actors. I like to work this way. I'm always looking for someone who is authentic and who doesn't need to 'act.' He just needs to be reminded of his own traumas or his story. And he just needs to act it out in front of the camera. Was there any particularly big challenge in making this movie? To be honest, the biggest challenge was in the editing room. We made quite a big chunk of it happen in the editing room. Because non-professional actors don't care if they look good on camera, we had some unique takes and had to find and put together the right material. We've been in the editing room for almost 13 months. It was quite painful, but I wouldn't change that. The three men in the family each get a chapter in the film. The mother doesn't have her own chapter, but she is still always there. Can you explain that decision and the role of the mother? For me, it's a story about how to be a man, looking for manhood. And these guys are wild. Every one of them is wild. The only person who is somehow calm is the mother. She is the calm force trying to make sense of the mess that is happening. So she's very important to the story. I wanted to keep this masculine point of view, but I used the female energy to make sense of it. Tell me about your production company and the other key production firm on the film… AZN kru is my production company. I run it with my wife. So, it's a little family business. We've been doing commercials and everything, and now we are transitioning to features and fiction, and we want to make a splash in the Czech Republic. The other company is my friend's and is called nutprodukce. They're well established in the Czech Republic, so we can use their credit to get funding. All the creativity came from our side, including the Vietnamese aspect. And they provided the perfect dramaturgy and the know-how to fund a low-budget film. We brought the know-how of Vietnamese people, how to save money, and still have the production value. Where did you shoot? My biggest dream was to shoot it in Cheb, the town where I grew up, near the border with Germany. But our budget didn't allow that. So we had to fake everything in Prague. When you see Netflix and Amazon shooting these big TV shows in Prague, they can fake it. So we can fake it as well. We just faked the small town and shot 23 days in Prague and Slovakia and five days in Vietnam. Is there anything else you'd like to mention about ? In the film, Kien is sent back to Vietnam by his parents and then is reunited with them after 10 years. I would highlight that this is a very common thing in Vietnamese immigrant culture. That's the way parents have the time and their hands free to work. During the shooting process, I realized that this idea of sending kids away was weird for Czech people. But for the Vietnamese people, it's a common thing. It also happened to me when I was young, like 5 or 6 years old. But I was lucky that my Czech nanny somehow persuaded my father to bring me back after a couple of months. You are not only premiering your first feature at the festival, but also pitching , an anime series that you are working on, again via AZN and nutprodukce. You are pitching that in the . Congratulations on having the energy to present two projects in Karlovy Vary! And what can you share about and its inspiration? The work ethic, I think, I inherited from my parents, because I don't like to just stand still and do nothing. This is my next project. I have a little sister who is 18 years younger. She's Gen Z, and I would say I'm a millennial. And I noticed that these kids are so reliant on technology and social media, and it's consuming them. I think it's the biggest problem for this generation, being stuck in technology. They don't know what the offline world is. They only know the online. Lost Boys is the story of a girl who's trying to find her escape or exit from this matrix. She finds a group of boys who get into fights. They like to feel the realness of the fights. And she wants to join them, but they don't accept her, because she's a girl. 'We accept only boys, because we are the Lost Boys.' And so she changes her outfit, and she becomes a boy. She becomes Kenny and wants to join the group so she can finally be happy and feel something. I would say it's like Fight Club for Gen Z. Best of The Hollywood Reporter The 40 Best Films About the Immigrant Experience Wes Anderson's Movies Ranked From Worst to Best 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts
Yahoo
08-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How 'Cali' became a slur among Vietnam's growing army of nationalists
Last fall, Vietnam opened a sprawling new military museum here, and among thousands of artifacts in the four-story building and a courtyard filled with tanks and aircrafts, one exhibit quickly became the star attraction: the flag of South Vietnam. The government regards the yellow banner with three red stripes as a sign of resistance to the communist regime, violating laws about inciting dissent. With few exceptions, it is not displayed. Reactions to the rare sighting soon went viral. Young visitors at the Vietnam Military History Museum posted photos of themselves next to the flag with deep frowns, thumbs down or middle fingers raised. As the photos drew unwanted attention, the flag was unpinned from a wall and folded within a display case. Social media content featuring rude hand gestures was scrubbed from the internet. But the phenomenon persisted. Several weeks ago, schoolchildren who were on tour made it a point to check out the flag. Every few minutes, a new group crowded around the banner — also known online as the 'Cali' flag — holding up middle fingers or crossing their hands to form an 'X.' In Vietnam, Cali — sometimes written as 'kali' — has long been a reference to the Vietnamese diaspora in California, where many Vietnamese-Americans still fly the flag of the south to represent the fight against communism and the nation they lost with the war. People who live in Vietnam, however, are more likely to view it as a symbol of American imperialism, and as nationalistic sentiment here has swelled in recent years, evoking the Golden State has become a shorthand of sorts to criticize those opponents. Read more: In Vietnam, an unlikely outpost for Chicano culture 'They use that as a label against anyone who disagrees with state policy,' says Nguyen Khac Giang, a research fellow at Singapore's Yusof Ishak Institute, known for its political and socioeconomic research on Southeast Asia. There have been other signs of growing nationalism in the past year, often in response to perceptions of American influence. In addition to animosity toward the 'Cali' flag, a U.S.-backed university in Ho Chi Minh City was attacked over suspicions of foreign interference. And an aspiring Vietnamese pop star who'd been a contestant on 'American Idol' was savaged on social media last summer after footage of her singing at the U.S. memorial service of an anti-communist activist surfaced. Vietnamese nationalism, Giang said, is bolstered at every level by the country's one-party rule. The government controls education and public media; independent journalists and bloggers who have criticized the government have been imprisoned. In addition, the party's ability to influence social media narratives has improved over the last several years, particularly among the nation's youth. Since 2017, Vietnamese authorities have employed thousands of cyber troops to police content online, forming a military unit under the defense ministry known as Force 47. In 2018, the country passed a cybersecurity law that enabled it to demand social media platforms take down any content that it deems anti-state. The resulting one-sided discourse means that views that don't align with official propaganda often draw harassment and ostracism. Read more: 50 years after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam tweaks the story of its victory At times, the government has also used that power to try and rein in nationalism when it grows too extreme — though banning posts about the South Vietnam flag did little to quell enthusiasm at the museum. Some visitors who were making hand signs said they were expressing their disapproval of a regime that, they'd been taught, oppressed Vietnamese people. One teenager unfurled and held up the national flag — red with a yellow star — for a photo. 'It's hard to say if I agree or disagree with the rude gestures,' said Dang Thi Bich Hanh, a 25-year-old coffee shop manager who was among the visitors. 'Those young people's gestures were not quite right, but I think they reflect their feelings when looking at the flag and thinking about that part of history and what previous generations had to endure.' Before she left, she took a selfie with her middle finger raised to the folded cloth. ::: Five years ago, when a student from a rural region of the Mekong Delta earned a full scholarship to an international university in Ho Chi Minh City, it seemed like a dream come true. But last August, when the school was caught up in the growing wave of nationalism, he began to worry that his association with Fulbright University Vietnam could affect his safety and his future. 'I was scared,' said the recent graduate, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. He had just started a new job in education and avoided mentioning his alma mater to coworkers and wearing shirts marked with the school name. 'You had all kinds of narratives. Especially with the disinformation spreading at the time, it had some negative impacts on my mental health.' Read more: VIETNAM WAR / 1959-1975 The attacks included allegations that Fulbright, which opened in 2016 with partial funding from the U.S. government, was cultivating Western liberal and democratic values that could undermine the Vietnamese government. Nationalists criticized any possible hint of anti-communist leanings at the school, such as not prominently displaying the Vietnamese flag at commencement. Even last year's graduation slogan, 'Fearless,' sparked suspicions that students could be plotting a political movement. 'You are seeing new heights of nationalism for sure, and it's hard to measure,' said Vu Minh Hoang, a diplomatic historian and professor at the university. Hoang said the online allegations — none of which were true — led to threats of violence against the university, and there was talk that some parents withdrew their children because of them. Several students said their affiliation drew hate speech from strangers and distrustful questions from family members and employers. Academics said the Vietnamese government likely acted quickly to shut down the backlash against Fulbright in order to prevent the anti-American sentiment from harming its ties with the U.S., its largest trade partner. But some of the original accusations were propagated by state media and bots associated with the Ministry of Defense, hinting at a schism within the party. Hoang said that while nationalism is often utilized as a uniting force in Vietnam and beyond, it also has the potential to create instability if it grows beyond the government's estimation or control. 'For a long time, it has been the official policy to make peace with the overseas Vietnamese community and the United States,' Hoang said. 'So this wave of online ultranationalism is seen by the Vietnamese state as unhelpful, inaccurate and, to some extent, going against official directions.' ::: Last summer, footage of Myra Tran singing at the Westminster funeral of Ly Tong, an anti-communist activist, surfaced online. She'd achieved a degree of fame by winning a singing reality show in Vietnam and appearing on 'American Idol' in 2019, but she received harsh condemnation from online nationalists and state media when the video from several years ago went viral. Facebook and TikTok users labeled Tran, now 25, as traitorous, anti-Vietnam — and Cali. The controversy prompted a more broadly-based movement to ferret out other Vietnamese celebrities suspected of conspiring against the country. Internet sleuths scoured the web for anyone who, like Tran, had appeared alongside the flag of South Vietnam and attacked them. Read more: Letters to the Editor: The Vietnam War tore our country apart. Did we ever recover? An entertainment writer in Ho Chi Minh City, who did not want to be identified for fear of being targeted, says that as Vietnamese youth have become more nationalistic online, musicians and other artists have felt pressure to actively demonstrate their patriotism or risk the wrath of cancel culture. He added that the scrutiny of symbols like the South Vietnam flag has given those with connections to the U.S. greater reason to worry about being attacked online or losing job opportunities. That could discourage Vietnamese who live overseas — a demographic that the government has long sought to attract back to the country — from pursuing business or careers in Vietnam. 'There used to be a time when artists were very chill and careless, even though they know there has been this rivalry and this history,' he said. 'I think everybody is getting more sensitive now. Everyone is nervous and trying to be more careful.' Tran was bullied online and cut from a music television program for her 'transgression.' She issued a public apology in which she expressed gratitude to be Vietnamese, denied any intention of harming national security and promised to learn from her mistakes. Two months later, Tran was allowed to perform again. She returned to the stage at a concert in Ho Chi Minh City, where she cried and thanked fans for forgiving her. But not everyone was willing to excuse her. From the crowd, several viewers jeered and yelled at Tran to 'go home.' Videos of the concert sparked fierce debate on Facebook among Tran's defenders and her critics. 'The patriotic youth are so chaotic now,' one Vietnamese user complained after denouncing the hate that Tran was receiving online. Another shot back: 'Then go back to Cali.' Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
CBC
31-05-2025
- General
- CBC
This man can't return to his homeland of Vietnam. Still, he's proud of his heritage
Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, Dong Van Tran is grateful for the life he has in Canada. His journey to Saskatoon wasn't easy.
