Animating Archives with Emotion in “Love, Dad”

The New Yorker, November 30, 2022: Animating Archives with Emotion in “Love, Dad”

“When she set out to make a documentary short about her correspondence with her father while he was in prison, the filmmaker Diana Cam Van Nguyen didn’t intend for it to be quite so personal. Biographical, sure—she knew she would draw on the letters that she and her father had exchanged in that time—but nothing especially emotional. (Nguyen, in film, doesn’t divulge specifics such as why her father was in prison.) At a workshop, when the film was already in progress, a tension came to the forefront: as Nguyen put it, people reading the script soon identified that ‘I didn’t have a problem with my dad because he’d been in prison but because of something else.’

“The story of that ‘something else’ is less tidy than the tale of a daughter missing her incarcerated father, and, in excavating their conflict, the film brings up crude emotions, the type that seem dangerous to feel at all, much less harbor for years. ‘I was not prepared at the time for doing such a personal story,’ she said. And yet, with the production already in motion, she couldn’t step back, either. Nguyen decided to go forward with the more intimate version of the film, and hoped to heal in the process, to address their issues and then move forward. The documentary, in turn, inhabits both the rawness of realization and the solace that comes from accepting reality. It still incorporates elements of her dad’s time in prison, but its true energy comes from dissecting what went wrong after her father returned home—only for the family to split up again, for a different and, perhaps, more devastating reason.”

Additional reading:

Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, April 30, 2022: Letters from My Father: A Conversation with Diana Cam Van Nguyen

Diana Cam Van Nguyen on Vimeo