"The Motherload" film Co-Written and Directed by MFA Alumnus Van Tran Nguyen

On October 5, 2024, the film "The Motherload", by UB 2017 MFA Alumnus Van Tran Nguyen, had its world premiere at the Hawaii Internation Film Festival. More festival info here. Artist website: https://www.vantrannguyen.com/

Coming Soon: Theatrical Release in 2025

Feature-length film, THE MOTHERLOAD (2025) is written by Van Tran Nguyen and directed by Van Tran Nguyen and Alex Derwick. 

Synopsis: "Conflict among the mother-daughter duo arises when Jessca embarks on a quest to find a home that once belonged to her mother’s family during pre-war Vietnam. Kim (Jessca’s mother), happy in her new but precarious position in America, fights to stay stateside. As their desires cause them to grow apart they are faced with old myths about the motherland, depicted in a public-broadcasting television show. With a cast consisting only of two Vietnamese-American women re-enacting and satirizing scenes from celebrated Vietnam War films while depicting a diasporic reality, this movie takes a closer look at what has been lost in war, what we find in the rubble, and how to hold on to what remains."

Filmmaker's Statement: 

In continuation with ERIE COUNTY SMILE *(2021), this new film further explores satire and nostalgia. THE MOTHERLOAD posits an intervention in the auteur director’s impulse to make war films. I interrogate the purportedly anti-Vietnam War sentiments of filmmakers from the late 1970s to the end of the century. The case studies referenced in my movie are *Apocalypse Now (1979) directed by Francis Ford Coppola, FULL METAL JACKET (1987) directed by Stanley Kubrick, and Platoon (1986) directed by Oliver Stone. The MOTHERLOAD starring Sang Tran, who is also my mother. Her lived experience is informed by post-war Vietnam. As she re-enacts (shot-for-shot) selected scenes from the case studies, I explore the limitations of an “antiwar” sensibility. By process of creating a stunning tableau of violence and situating empathy or point-of-view, implicitly enlists empire and subject, or more plainly, winners and losers. I argue that by virtue of representing war, dematerializes antiwar sentiments. I make the argument that these movies have “placed Vietnam in amber” as a place of constant conflict; rendering Vietnam as not a nation but a war. The erasure of post-war Vietnam; its rebuilding and governmental collapse are largely unrecognized in these case studies. The “Vietnamese” characters are often not depicted by Vietnamese actors and are sparsely written as an Asiatic enemy, this further complicates the director’s claim of an antiwar representation and materializes the empirical consequences of these films.

Directed By: Van Tran Nguyen and Alex Derwick// Written By: Van Tran Nguyen// Director of Photography: EP Press// Editing By: Alex Derwick// Music By: Brendan Picone// Color By: Tam Le, of Sodalite// VFX Artist: Mengtai Zhang// Sound Engineer and Mixing: Patrick Burgess// Translations By: Kieu-Anh Troung and Thuy-Dung Ho