Introduction

In Nguyễn’s work The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon the artist explored the physical remnants of the Vietnam War. The landscape in the province of Quảng Trị where the film is set is filled with bombshells, ammunition and untriggered explosives. The narrative follows a young woman named Nguyêt who alone takes care of her traumatized mother and their family run scrap yard. As an escape from reality Nguyêt creates sculptures of old bomb shells, sculptures that also take place in the gallery room. These, once death bringing objects are in the film transformed into objects whose resonating sounds have a healing power.

The Boat People show a future where it is uncertain whether humanity has survived. A group of children travels the seas and collect histories from objects they find. The group lands in a place formerly known as Bataan. A Philippine province, west of the country’s capitol Manila, where a large refugee camp was built to take care of Vietnamese boat refugees. The term “boat people” was used for the approximately 800,000 humans who fled Vietnam by boat after the war.

In The Island events on the small island Pulau Bidong on the coast of Malaysia – once the world’s largest refugee camp – is weaved together with a dystopian vision of the future. Many of Nguyễn’s films take place in his home country of Vietnam and neighboring areas in southeast Asia. Even though they often are grounded in the Vietnam War and its aftermath the discussed themes are frightfully contemporary. The exodus from Vietnam and its neighboring countries during and after the Vietnam War was one of the first events referred to in mass media as a refugee crisis. A word that has become commonplace for us today when millions of humans are on the run from totalitarian terror, war and climate change.