To: you, to night
A recollection of personal thoughts on immigration, intergenerational trauma, gentrification, and what it means to seek refuge on the stolen land that is Vancouver. Located amidst dissonances of language and translation, between what is (not) seen and what is (not) heard, the film is a self-reflexive act of resistance, a quiet mourning for the perpetuating dreams of generations of Vietnamese immigrants who lived and left their lives in between the mist of nights. The film is dedicated to 39 Vietnamese immigrants who passed away in a container on their way into England in November 2019.
To: you, to night is an experimental documentary film in the form of a postcard/letter. Moving through downtown Vancouver streets around midnight, the film embodies the personal affective experience of processing an overwhelming landscape that is embedded within a history of gentrification, commodification, colonization while simultaneously dealing with the grief within the Vietnamese community in November 2019. Blending the internal and external landscapes, the history and the now, the personal and the political, the film aims to express and mitigate a sensorial understanding of the place and (dis)place, to acknowledge and see the land of so-called Vancouver for what it is through an embodied understanding of an outsider while processing personal grief and feelings of inbetweeness as a young Vietnamese woman through inhabiting the dissonances of language and translation.
Bio
Hân Phạm is an emerging artist and a documentary/ experimental filmmaker from Saigon, Vietnam. Working with experimental moving images and soundscapes, her works think through the ephemerality of memory, language and history in relation to the constantly changing landscapes, rooting in the inbetweeness of distance as space for radical reflection and healing. Pham has exhibited at Vancouver International Film Festival, DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, and Vines Arts Festival. She is currently completing her BFA in Film at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC.