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Screening

Two Films and a Talk with Trinh T. Minh-ha

Two Films and a Talk with Trinh T. Minh-ha
Two Films and a Talk with Trinh T. Minh-ha

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MARCH 15-16

Presented by Centre A & The Cinematheque.

In Person (March 16): Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Centre A and The Cinematheque, with support from SFU David Lam Centre and SFU Department of Humanities, welcome renowned Vietnamese-born artist, writer, and scholar Trinh T. Minh-ha for a special two-night program of her acclaimed film work. Subjective, self-reflexive, and intellectual, infused with feminism and anti-colonialism, and offering a dizzying array of sights and sounds, the award-winning "anti-anthropological" films of Trinh represent a startling reinvention of the documentary form. Two of these intoxicating nonfiction works - Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) and Forgetting Vietnam (2015) - will screen at The Cinematheque, with Trinh on hand to introduce and discuss the latter, receiving its Vancouver premiere.

Surname Viet Given Name Nam

March 15

Independent in thought and delicate in craftmanship, the film is strung with the tensile strength of piano wire.
– Karen Jaehne, Film Comment

One of the best known works by celebrated film artist and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, Surname Viet Given Name Nam explores questions of identity, popular memory, and culture through Vietnamese women's resistance in Vietnam and the United States. The film combines dance, text, folk poetry, and women’s testimony to call into question official histories and the politics of documentary and interview. "A challenging and rewarding work that places Trinh T. Minh-ha as one of the leading American independent filmmakers of the '80s" (New Directors/New Films, New York).

Forgetting Vietnam

March 16

VANCOUVER PREMIERE! Drawing on ancient stories of Vietnam’s creation, this lyrical film essay from Trinh T. Minh-ha (Surname Viet Given Name Nam) moves between Hi-8 footage shot in 1995 and digital footage filmed in 2012. Images of contemporary life in Vietnam unfold in a dialogue between land and water, the two elements that form the Vietnamese term for country, “đất nứớc.” Through the experiences of local inhabitants, immigrants, and veterans, Forgetting Vietnam honours the survivors of the Vietnam War and commemorates the 40th anniversary of the war’s end.

Trinh T. Minh-ha will be in attendance to introduce and discuss Forgetting Vietnam. A reception will be held afterwards in The Cinematheque lobby. Copies of Trinh’s most recent book, Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared (2016), will be available to purchase.

Moderated by Helen Leung, Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies at SFU David Lam Centre.

Trinh T. Minh-ha
Trinh T. Minh-ha is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, composer, and scholar whose films have been given over fifty retrospectives internationally. She has lectured worldwide on film, art, feminism, and cultural politics. She is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.