Saigon Experimental VI
Day 1: 06:30 PM – 10:30 PM, 21 Aug 2026
Registration link
Day 2: 04:30 PM – 08:30 PM, 22 Aug 2026
Registration link
257 Hoàng Văn Thụ, Tân Sơn Hòa Ward, Tân Bình District, HCMC
From the organizer:
Initiated in Ho Chi Minh City in 2019, Saigon Experimental is a platform dedicated to moving-image practices. Each edition presents a programme of around 25 films selected from an open call, while also collaborating with artists, curators, and institutions on curated screenings and exhibitions internationally.
– The event is FREE but don’t forget to register !
– The films include Vietnamese and English subtitles
– Each day will include a new selection of films, special guests for post-screening talks, and the opportunity for audience members to vote for our Saigon Experimental Audience Award (with a final cash prize attributed to the winning filmmaker).
Programme Day 1: 21 Aug 2026
> Doors open: 06:30 PM
> Screening : 07 PM – 09 PM
> Talk: 09:10 PM – 10:10 PM
> Doors close: 10:30 PM
We’ll have some snacks and beverages on site but considering the late time everyone is welcome to bring their own food and drinks
> Film programme:
1. The House That Stays (2023)
Lê Ngọc Duy | Việt Nam | 2023 | 15:00
In a memory-laden house, daily conversations echo between a mother and her two sons, all seemingly asleep. This hybrid autobiographical short chronicles a personal memory from director Duy Ngoc Le’s adolescence, using set design and reenactment to reconstruct his childhood home and featuring his mother’s voice as part of the cast.
Duy Ngoc Le (b. 2000) is a filmmaker from Da Nang whose work explores the politics of memory, queer expression, and Central Vietnamese heritage. His latest short film, ‘Before the Sea Forgets’, premiered at the 2025 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, where it was nominated for the Queer Palm. A recipient of the Prince Claus Fund Seed Award and the CJ Short Film Project production grant, he participated in the 2025 Locarno Filmmakers Academy and was selected as an artist-in-residence at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur at Villa Sträuli. Using narrative, essayistic, reenactment, and archival forms, Le’s recent films question the influence of dominant systems on the construction of collective history. He is a member of the A Sông art collective, where he organises and co-programmes the grassroots initiative Cinema CNN (Cinema of Peasants), promoting local independent cinema.
2. Apocalypse (Tận thế)
Benoit Méry | Pháp | 2024 | 14:22
Set in the heart of Hellfest, one of Europe’s largest metal music festivals, ‘Apocalypse’ is an experimental documentary in which music gradually takes possession of performers, organisers and festivalgoers alike. Between stage dives, pounding rhythms and moments of collective delirium, the film captures the ecstatic chaos of the festival.
Benoit Méry holds degrees in Film Studies from Paris 8 and in Recording Arts from Paris Est. He studied under Claire Simon. In 2014, he directed ‘Dans la Peau’, a self-produced short documentary that was awarded by France Télévisions. In 2019, Benoit created ‘Invisible’, a radio production for France Culture.
3. IMAGE ME (HÌNH (DUNG) TÔI)
Till Gombert | Đức | 2022 | 5:55
A photographic image in its stages of production — exposure, development and reproduction — which records the faces of two people. Linking the face to the photographic image, the experimental short ‘IMAGE ME’ reveals the merging of identity and depiction and the emergence of a continuous, self-referential loop of perception.
Till Gombert (b. 1991, Germany) studied Media Art at Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe and at the postgraduate programme at Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln. His narrative and experimental films, often shot on Super 8, have been presented in various festivals, including Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Oscar-qualifying festivals such as Tirana International Film Festival and IN THE PALACE International Short Film Festival. He is also a founding member of the Cologne-based artist-run film lab FILM AUF FILM.
4. Thousand Thrashing Arms (Ngàn tay cuồng vũ)
Dina Mimi | Palestine | 2024 | 12:36
‘Thousand Thrashing Arms’ explores the relationship between liberation, dreams and movement, weaving together found and original footage. Drawing on Frantz Fanon — “The first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place and not to go beyond certain limits… I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing” — the film guides our imagination towards liberatory insurgencies. From x-ray shots and sequences of dancing to resistance fighters and floating manta rays, Mimi frames the body as a site of resistance. Patching together poetic gestures of running in reverse, skipping feet and wrapping arms, the film constructs a (dissociative) dream, all for the sake of inevitable freedom.
Dina Mimi is a Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker who is based between Palestine and the Netherlands. Through experimental filmmaking and lecture performances, she interrogates how and when bodies become sites of resistance. This materialises through her interest in moving image, especially in found footage that is discarded and therefore deemed invaluable. Approaching editing as a playground, Mimi explores the opacity of images — their capacity to vanish or evade capture — and employs non-linear narration, in her ongoing engagement with the politics of the body.
5. NoNameBlade (Đao vô danh)
Zhu Xiang-Pu | Đài Loan | 2024 | 15:00
‘NoNameBlade’ is a Taiwanese puppet film that reimagines traditional glove puppetry through contemporary cinematic language and motion performance. Set in a stylised martial arts world, the story follows a swordsman who abandons established techniques and confronts his own limitations in search of a new path. Through themes of identity, discipline, and transformation, the film explores what it means to redefine tradition rather than inherit it.
Xiang-Pu Zhu apprenticed with his father’s puppet troupe and discovered a passion for drawing at an early age. He left home to study animation and film. After his father’s death from cancer in 2015, he returned to the troupe and began reshaping its artistic direction, integrating projection art into live performances. He later created the film ‘NoNameBlade’.
6. Wet Wood
Hoàng Hà | Việt Nam | 2023 | 15:30
A boy wakes up in a filthy room to the sound of someone chopping wood outside. When he steps out, he sees a strange man bandaged at the arm, chopping logs with a rusted axe, marking the beginning of a cycle of repetitive labor and mounting unease.
Ha Hoang (born in 2002 in Mong Cai, Quang Ninh), graduated in Digital Film Production from RMIT University. From a young age, she has dreamt of becoming a filmmaker and later relocated to Ho Chi Minh City to pursue this path. Her work and interests focus on horror and coming-of-age genres.
7. Chapel of Very Small Creations (Nhà nguyện của tạo vật tí hon)
Simone Hooymans | Na Uy | 2022 | 7:26
The animation ‘Chapel of very small Creations’ shows a cave made of green, softly shaped rock formations where strange, enlightened creatures emerge. Ephemeral and transcendental, these tiny creations evoke microscopic organisms, whose liquid bodies disperse, swim, fly and fall. Here, life is rendered as a symphonic interaction between all elements, balancing between the earthly and the otherworldly, and suggesting a sense of spirituality.
Simone Hooymans (b. 1974) is a Dutch-born artist who lives and works in Norway. She graduated from the Art Academy for Visual Art in Arnhem (ArtEZ) and from St. Joost in Breda, the Netherlands. Hooymans is known for her experimental animations, which originate from hand-drawn imagery and are developed through digital animation techniques. Her films unfold in elusive and sometimes unsettling landscapes, forming visual poetry rooted in personal narratives and emotional memory. By constructing worlds beyond reality, she creates deceptive reflections of the natural environment that challenge the perception of reality.
8. Babysteps
Bách Xuân Phương | Việt Nam | 2024 | 3:29
‘Babysteps’ can be understood as a rebirth of a body that has already given up, marking the beginning of one’s journey toward opening the heart chakra. Inspired by Sajiste’s ‘The Fourth Portal’ mixtape, the short also serves as the music video for track four. We follow the relationship between a soulless physical body that spent its entire life lying down doing nothing, and a spiritual being whose sole duty is to watch over its counterpart. One fateful night, the physical body takes a leap of faith and ultimately connects the body and the heart back into one entity.
Phuong Xuan Bach is a Vietnamese filmmaker working across documentary and fiction. Born in 2003 and raised in the heart of Hanoi’s Old Quarter, he grew up doodling on moldy walls and watching his neighbors’ arguments from his balcony. ‘Babysteps’ is his first narrative short and festival entry. He is currently based in Ho Chi Minh City, working on his next short.
9. Tristesse (Sầu thương)
Muraoka Yuri | Nhật Bản | 2026 | 11:14
Written as a stream of anecdotes, thoughts and diary entries, ‘Tristesse’ begins with home-recorded images and fragments of daily life, gradually gaining intensity and unfolding into her highly stylised artistic universe of photomontages, saturated colours, and symbolic objects.
Yuri Muraoka was born in Tokyo in 1981. She dropped out of the high school attached to Japan Women’s University, later graduating from the 26th class of the Image Forum Institute of the Moving Image. Muraoka considers her moving image and photography practice as “works of self-portraiture”. All of her works are self-created and self-performed. She has also been working on poetry since 2018, and is a mother of two daughters.
10. From the Void of Time (Từ khoảng trống thời gian)
Rico Wong | Hồng Kông | 2024 | 9:48
Taking the form of a diary, ‘From the Void of Time’ traces the different stages of the narrator’s imprisonment. In a tangled tapestry of summer recollections, time seems to meander, fleetingly swift and at times languid. The narrator’s consciousness flutters, untethered and free, guiding us through seemingly unrelated visual elements: nature seen from up close, nature seen from afar, a hand-drawn sketch, a detail of a wall.
A meditation on time passing.
Rico Wong is an artist-filmmaker based in London and currently a fine art student at Goldsmiths. He wanders between documentary and sound. Growing up in Hong Kong during a turbulent period has shaped his creative focus on the human experience of individuals navigating larger political and social forces. His latest film, ‘Compact Disc’, won the New:Vision Award at CPH:DOX, the Grand Prize of the TIDF Visionary Award, and was selected for VideoEX 2026.Visionary Award và được chọn tham gia liên hoan phim thể nghiệm VideoEX 2026.
> Post-screening Talk #1: ‘In Focus but Out of Frame – Vietnamese filmmakers in conversation’> with Duy Ngoc Le, Phuong Xuan Bach, and Ha Hoang.
Bringing together the directors of Wet Wood, The House That Stays, and Babysteps, ‘In Focus but Out of Frame’ offers an opportunity to hear from three filmmakers with distinct artistic practices, from the creative processes and challenges behind their works, to the visual environments that have nourished their artistic visions. The discussion will also expand into a broader reflection on what it means to pursue independent filmmaking in Vietnam today: finding references beyond the mainstream, building artistic communities, and imagining alternative, sustainable paths for cinema beyond established industry structures. Moderated by artist and Saigon Experimental jury member Linh San, the discussion will be followed by a Q&A with the audience.
The talk will be conducted in Vietnamese with English translation available.
About speakers
Hoàng Hà
Ha Hoang (born in 2002 in Mong Cai, Quang Ninh), graduated in Digital Film Production from RMIT University. From a young age, she has dreamt of becoming a filmmaker and later relocated to Ho Chi Minh City to pursue this path. Her work and interests focus on horror and coming-of-age genres.
Bách Xuân Phương
Phuong Xuan Bach is a Vietnamese filmmaker working across documentary and fiction. Born in 2003 and raised in the heart of Hanoi’s Old Quarter, he grew up doodling on moldy walls and watching his neighbors’ arguments from his balcony. ‘Babysteps’ is his first narrative short and festival entry. He is currently based in Ho Chi Minh City, working on his next short.
Lê Ngọc Duy
Duy Ngoc Le (b. 2000) is a filmmaker from Da Nang whose work explores the politics of memory, queer expression, and Central Vietnamese heritage. His latest short film, ‘Before the Sea Forgets’, premiered at the 2025 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, where it was nominated for the Queer Palm. A recipient of the Prince Claus Fund Seed Award and the CJ Short Film Project production grant, he participated in the 2025 Locarno Filmmakers Academy and was selected as an artist-in-residence at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur at Villa Sträuli. Using narrative, essayistic, reenactment, and archival forms, Le’s recent films question the influence of dominant systems on the construction of collective history. He is a member of the A Sông art collective, where he organises and co-programmes the grassroots initiative Cinema CNN (Cinema of Peasants), promoting local independent cinema.
Linh San
Linh San is a Hanoi-based artist and film programmer. Over the years, she has curated numerous screening programmes and public discussions dedicated to independent and experimental cinema, artist films, and animation. Her programming explores the intersections between moving image, visual art, and regional cultural contexts, creating spaces for dialogue between filmmakers, artists, and audiences. Her selected recent projects include ‘time drifts, spring grasses’, ‘Human-made. Tech-tales.’ (2025) and Ô Cách Animation (2026) – a collaborative programme co-developed with fellow artists and researchers that surveys animation practices in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
Programme Day 2:
> Doors open: 04:30 PM
> Screening : 05 PM – 07 PM
> Talk: 07:10 PM – 08:10 PM
> Doors close: 09 PM
We’ll have some snacks and beverages on site but considering the late time everyone is welcome to bring their own food and drinks
> Film programme:
1. Looking for Letine (Đi tìm Letine)
Paul Tarragó | Anh | 2024 | 15:20
“Unable to locate the grave of Letine — leader of a 19th-century acrobatic cycling troupe (and buried locally) — I went home and wondered. And then I made this film. ‘Looking for Letine’ combines experimental animation, stylised domestic drama and autobiography, alongside reflections on mortality, filmmaking and magic”.
Paul Tarragó is a filmmaker living in London, working with both video and celluloid. His work? A mix of underground experimentation and metafiction, tugging at the leash of film language but with narrative often held close at hand.
2. MF*er’s Birthday – Saif Alsaegh
Saif Alsaegh | Mỹ | 2024 | 7:00
‘MF*er’s Birthday’ uses dance as a central motif to examine political power and life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Through archival materials and broadcast footage, the film juxtaposes public appearances by state figures with images of violence, local festivities and everyday Iraqi life. Segments of celebration and normalcy become increasingly eerie as the surrounding context of conflict and control lingers beneath these images. Across these materials, dance becomes a recurring gesture — one weaving together propaganda, spectacle, and broader geopolitical narratives.
Saif Alsaegh is a United States-based filmmaker from Baghdad, Iraq. Much of Alsaegh’s work explores the contrast between his upbringing in Baghdad as part of the Chaldean minority in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the U.S. landscape where he currently lives.
His films have screened at festivals and venues including Cinéma du Réel, Kurzfilm Hamburg, Dokfest Kassel, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Gene Siskel Film Center. Alsaegh’s films are distributed by Video Data Bank. His work has been supported by fellowships and residencies including The Flaherty, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Yaddo.
3. As Political Landscapes Dissolve
Zora Ottink | Hà Lan | 2023 | 7:03
“Under the snow, water begins to flow. Everything slides; razors, snowplows, gender relations, identity politics and climate. Everything continually changes, decays and manifests again.”
Shot on 16mm film and taking its title from Bukowski’s socially critical poem ‘Dinosauria, We’, ‘As political landscapes dissolve’ is an associative, surrealistic film. In this reflective dream, the filmmaker and protagonist moves towards her mirror self, questioning identity within a dissolving political landscape and a world of melting ice caps.
Zora Ottink (b. 1997, Amsterdam) is an artist and writer working with film and photography. In 2021, she graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie’s Image and Language department. Drawing from her photographic background, she explores the fundamentals of the medium, working with 16mm film and researching techniques such as solarisation. In doing so, she creates surreal and associative visual narratives. Inspired by old travelogues, she adapts their capacity to carry us through memory into her personal contemporary perspective.
4. Future Idol (feat. NANIMONO) (Idol tương lai)
Teramoto Haruka | Nhật Bản | 2026 | 3:57
At some point in time, humanity disappeared from the Earth entirely. Orbital space became littered with debris. Among that debris, a single optical disc found its way by chance into a player, and a song began to play. The music carried within it the lingering thoughts of those who once lived, and these descended to Earth as vibrations. The planet’s abandoned technology stirred in response: satellite dishes listened, radio towers broadcast on their own, and city screens flickered with ghostly images of a singer. On a beach, a holographic figure danced, translucent against the shoreline, with waves lapping softly at her feet. Roadside CRT screens glowed with static, offering fleeting visions of seven figures who no longer existed. When the song ended, the disc was ejected. The Earth continued to shine in silence as the debris drifted endlessly in orbit. A music video for ‘FUTURE IDOL’, performed by NANIMONO.
Haruka Teramoto was born in Shiga, Japan, in 1997. In 2023, he completed a Master of Fine Arts at Kyoto City University of Arts. Teramoto works across live-action film, music video, and 2D/3DCG animation, in which he often incorporates photogrammetry. His practice draws on video, photography, text, sound, and narrative as interconnected media. A central focus of his practice is the structural properties of the moving image — particularly the frame and flicker — through which he explores the perceptual and material conditions of cinema.
‘a room’ was nominated at the 21st FANTOCHE International Animation Film Festival, while ‘FUTURE IDOL – NANIMONO’ was selected among the Top 50 music videos at MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN 2026. Teramoto has been selected for 100 Japanese Motion Graphic Creators in 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026
5. The Announced Tragedy (Bi kịch được báo trước)
Thanut Rujitanont | Bỉ, Phần Lan, Bồ Đào Nha, Úc, và Thái Lan | 2023 | 10:00
‘The Announced Tragedy’ uses animation as a process of memory consolidation. In doing so, the work becomes an extension and preservation of the director’s irrational and incomplete recollections of the house where he grew up. It recalls the space and time of those memories, ultimately overwriting, re-editing, and re-materialising them through animation. The work consists of four chapters, each enacting a specific childhood memory tied to the house.
Graduated from the RE:ANIMA European Joint Master in Animation, Thanut Rujitanont (b. 1993, Bangkok, Thailand) is an animation maker and founder of Graphy Animation, an independent studio based in Thailand. He is currently a PhD candidate at Griffith Film School in Australia. His animations have screened and received recognition at international festivals such as the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Digicon6 Asia, and the Beijing International Short Film Festival, to name a few. Working in artistic animation, he is actively engaged in promoting animation culture in Thailand and abroad through animation production, curatorial and organisational activities, and research.
6. Ảo Thật
Trần Nhi | Việt Nam | 2024 | 5:27
‘Ao that’ is an experimental short film conceived as a fictional job portfolio. It is partially based on the true story of a 3D fashion designer’s journey from the virtual world to the real world, and explores the confusion and sense of drifting that emerge in the process.
Nhi Tran (b. 2000, Quang Ninh, Vietnam) is a transdisciplinary artist working across photography, performing art, fashion, and writing. Her practice documents lived experience, tracing how technology fragments identity while embodied memory remains. Grounded in immersive, body-based and relational processes, her work examines societal norms, trauma, and psychological realities in contemporary Vietnam. Skeptical of secondhand narratives, she works through direct engagement and real-life situations. Her work has been exhibited at Matca, Danang Art Hub, Goethe-Institut, De La Sol Sun Life Flagship, AiRhue, IDECAF, Nocaibum Art Festival, and VCCA.
7. Three-Legged Crow in an Autonomous (Quạ ba chân trong vùng tự trị)
Beam Wong (Theerapat Wongpaisarnkit) | Thái Lan | 2024 | 14:04
Three years after the COVID outbreak, three people become friends in a short period of time, referring to each other by the nickname ‘Crow’. As time passes, they reconnect through a visual novel game that begins to collide with their reality. As the boundaries between the two begin to dissolve, the game’s myth-like narrative — alongside fragments of the friends’ own story — unfolds through dialogue boxes, photographic images, nocturnal cityscapes, diary-like narration, and computer-generated visions of crows, angels and other hybrid beings.
Beam Wong (Theerapat Wongpaisarnkit) is a Bangkok-based artist. His work spans a range of media, including film, music, installation and DJing. In 2020, both the COVID-19 pandemic and Thailand’s political movements sparked his interest in the idea of ‘country’ — not only as a geographical concept, but also as a sociopolitical, spiritual and historical one. Since then, his work has explored the relationship between notions of country and individual narratives. He works full-time as a video editor in advertising, co-hosts ‘Arttrovert’, a weekly podcast on art, and serves as an adviser to film students at Silpakorn University.
8. A Meeting Place
Lê Nguyên Phương | Việt Nam | 2023 | 3:20
“In 1985, my father, a professional volleyball player for the Vietnamese military, travelled to Siem Reap with his team for a training camp. A year later, he returned — not as an athlete, but as a soldier. In 2024, I travelled to Siem Reap with my father after moving away for two years. He spent four days with me before returning to Vietnam for work. A day later, my lover came to visit without him knowing.
‘Giao Diem’ examines my relationships in the aftermath of the American War, and how its ongoing colonial structures shape a persisting division between my loved ones. Through collaboration with my father and my partner — who have never met — I explore masculinity and intimacy within the context I was raised in, and what emerges when these two worlds collide”.
Phuong Nguyen Le (b. 2002, Hanoi) is an emerging Vietnamese photographer, artist, and researcher. His work engages with counter-historical approaches, drawing on familial, communal, and collective narratives. In 2023, he received the Objectifs Documentary Awards (Singapore) and the Tall Poppy Press Publishing Prize (Australia), leading to a debut monograph and solo exhibition of ‘Sunshine’. Le has exhibited at Studio 3năm and Biennale Photo Hanoi (Vietnam), Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film (Singapore), Jakarta International Photography Festival (Indonesia), Angkor Photo Festival (Cambodia), Photo Elyseé (Switzerland), and at the Museum of Australian Photography (Australia).
9. Howling (Tiếng tru)
Kawazoe Aya | Nhật Bản | 2023 | 23:00
‘Howling’ is a psychological thriller adapted from Hyakken Uchida’s fantastical short story. The tale unfolds when Shusaku Aota sees himself in the face of his deceased brother at the hospital. From there, reality collapses, leaving him uncertain of what is real and what is hallucination, what belongs to the past or the present, in an experience that feels like waking up from a dream upon dream upon dream. Here, a variety of cinematic shots on 16mm film interact with recurring motifs of symbolic doubles, liminal spaces, and architectural forms that (de)stabilise perception, forming a fragmented and eerie story held together through its images.
Aya Kawazoe was born in 1989 in Yokohama, Japan. She graduated from the master’s programme in Film Production at the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2022. She learnt filmmaking from Shinji Aoyama and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. In 2012, ‘The Elephant Died’ was selected by the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, while ‘Flame Out’ won the Japan Tomorrow Grand Prize at the Image Forum Festival. ‘HUMONGOUS!’ was officially selected for the short film section of the 2020 Cannes International Film Festival’s Semaine de la Critique. Her films have also been presented at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands), Lago Film Fest (Italy), New York Film Festival (US) and Festival de cine contemporáneo Black Canvas (Mexico) amongst others.
10. Nomadism, temporal connection and new feminine longings (Du cư, thời tính và khát vọng nữ giới mới)
María Bilbao Herrera | Venezuela / Tây Ban Nha | 2023 | 3:33
‘Nomadism, temporal connection and new feminine longings’ fuses different visual and sonic archives, exploring how trance rituals, ancestral traditions and electronic music sound practices intersect. The video shows a repeated sequence of hand gestures by Clara Rockmore, master of the theremin, an electronic instrument that produces sound through the movement of the hands within an electromagnetic field. When looped, her abrupt yet fluid gestures are spellbinding. The sound has been created from ritual music of African women, indigenous women and electronic music created by women, using repetition and rhythm to take us to hypnotic states. The piece invites us to get in touch with that willingness to listen and dance — one of the few possibilities to weave connections between different worlds — and unite voices and visions that speak of the feminine, from within.
Caraqueña and nomad by nature, María Bilbao-Herrera has lived and worked in nine cities in the last twenty years. An artist, organiser and art educator, she fuses creative expression, critical thinking and identity through participatory, collaborative and experimental experiences incorporating performance, video and sound. Bilbao-Herrera received a BFA in Interior Design from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale and an MA in Art Direction from Elisava Escola Superior de Disseny in Barcelona. After graduating, she attended the International Center of Photography in New York. In 2022 and 2023 she received the Equity Scholarship from The Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer, where she studies Deep Listening®.
She is Co-Founder of nodoCCS, an experimental platform for the arts based in Caracas, and Creative Director of the nodoCCS Video Festival. She is also Artistic Director of elRAiSE CARACAS gallery, and a Visual Arts high school teacher at The British School Caracas.
11. Thiếu, Nữ
Huỳnh-Thái Thuỵ | Canada / Việt Nam | 2025 | 14:15
A Vietnamese trans woman’s final letter to her pre-transition body and her family before secretly starting hormone replacement therapy. Conceptualised as an internal monologue, ‘Girl’ moves from her childhood memories to a vulnerable dialogue with her conscience as she weighs her decision to medically transition without the knowledge of her parents. The film shifts between grainy black-and-white and colour-distorted imagery, using juxtapositions, split-screen and performative staging to evoke fragmentation, remembering, and duality in this highly intimate retelling of a young trans woman’s gender journey.
Thuy Huynh-Thai is an interdisciplinary artist, film director, and documentarian born and raised in Sài Gòn, Vietnam. At the age of 17, Huynh-Thai began her BFA degree in Film Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University, and made it her mission to push the boundaries of filmmaking through formal experiments with the cinematic form. From combining documentation with performance art, music, and mixed media arts, to working exclusively with mediums like Mini DV tapes and 16mm celluloid film, Huynh-Thai has developed an idiosyncratic approach to image-making, allowing her to tell intimate stories about the beauty and complexity of life for diasporic Queer Vietnamese peoples.
> Event #2: ‘Animating the Moving Image’
with Linh San and Hue Nguyen.
The language of the moving image is inseparable from the technologies that produce it, from cameras and recording equipment to projection devices. Yet animation highlights a distinct dimension of this relationship: from its earliest days, the handcrafted nature of animation has revealed a meticulous process in which reality and imagination are simultaneously shaped and reconfigured. An extension of Saigon Experimental 6 screenings, ‘Animating the Moving Image’ opens a discussion on animation within contemporary filmmaking, revisiting the experimental endeavours of Vietnamese animation from the 1950s onwards.
Moving from historical to contemporary perspectives, the discussion explores the diverse forms and possibilities of animation, as well as its significant role in expanding the language of the moving image and contributing to the development of Vietnamese cinema.
The talk brings together artist and film programmer Linh San along with curator and researcher Hue Nguyen.
The talk will be conducted in Vietnamese with English translation available.
About speakers
Huế Nguyễn
Hue Nguyen holds a BA in Art and Media Studies at Fulbright University Vietnam and an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies of Contemporary Art at National Taipei University of Education. Her research interests span East and Southeast Asian art, with a focus on material agency, urban ecology, and socialist visual culture. Recent curatorial projects are Water, Ant and Rice Grains (2026, Á Space, Hanoi) and Travel Unbound (2024, Hong-Gah Museum, Taiwan). Hue participated in the Harvard-Yale Southeast Asia Studies Graduate Conference (2026), Southeast Asia’s Art Histories Postgraduate Symposium (2025), and Para Site Workshops for Emerging Arts Professionals (2024).
Linh San
Linh San is a Hanoi-based artist and film programmer. Over the years, she has curated numerous screening programmes and public discussions dedicated to independent and experimental cinema, artist films, and animation. Her programming explores the intersections between moving image, visual art, and regional cultural contexts, creating spaces for dialogue between filmmakers, artists, and audiences. Her selected recent projects include ‘time drifts, spring grasses’, ‘Human-made. Tech-tales.’ (2025) and Ô Cách Animation (2026) – a collaborative programme co-developed with fellow artists and researchers that surveys animation practices in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
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These events were made possible with the support of Purin Film Fund, Japan Foundation Center for Cultural Exchange in Vietnam, and the Goethe-Institut Ho Chi Minh City, under the patronage of the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Ho Chi Minh City.
> All video, poster and promo designs by the one and only Nathan M. Collis.
> Please note that the event is not suitable for children or young viewers.
> Message us on FB, IG or by [email protected] if you have any questions.
> View past sessions on our website.
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