Tuan Andrew Nguyen Because No One Living Will Listen / Người Sống Chẳng Ai Nghe, 2023

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s 2023 film continues his ongoing interest in the legacy of tirailleurs, soldiers from French colonial territories brought to Vietnam to combat anticolonial uprisings during the First Indochina War (1946–1954). Because No One Living Will Listen follows Habiba, a Vietnamese woman whose father was a Moroccan soldier who defected from the French army. The film is based around a speculative letter, written by Habiba to her father—who died when she was a baby—as a way to speak to him in his absence. Because No One Living Will Listen centers the Moroccan soldiers who defected from the colonial army and whose repatriation to Morocco was hindered by the outbreak of the Vietnam War. The film complicates the historical record of the period between the end of the First Indochina War in 1954 (which is also the focus of Nguyen’s film The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, 2019) and the conclusion and aftermath of the Vietnam War in 1972 (the subject of The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, 2022), while also providing a narrative thread that connects all three of the films on view in this exhibition.