in between frames, i dream the dreams i have been dreaming
07 pm – 08:30 pm, Wed 30 July 2025 & 05 pm – 06:15 pm, Sat 02 Aug 2025
Floor 6, Amanaki Thảo Điền Hotel
10 Nguyễn Đăng Giai, Thảo Điền, HCMC
Registration link (30 people)
From the organizer:
in between frames, i dream the dreams i have been dreaming is a two-part screening programme curated by Lại Minh Ngọc in response to 6 PM in the afternoon. The day was long. The night was too long. I was always in the past… a duo exhibition by Tâm Đỗ and Lê Đ. Chung.
The screening takes a personal turn with moving image works and films that portray from seemingly traditional concepts to unconventional ideas of Vietnamese womanhood—The Virgin Mary opening her mythical arms to welcome migrants from Ninh Bình to Saigon in promise of a new land; a nurse veiling her face while treating a patient in the jungle, her mesmerizing gaze leaving viewers uncertain whether she’s the protagonist or antagonist of fragmented montages of a propaganda film; young girls finding themselves in 1970s Saigon through music, love, and stimulants….
As the frames flip, the girls lean on their dreams, where they liberate themselves from the framings. In so doing, the programme questions the representation of female figures in Vietnamese cinema, which often places them in the moral confinement of “tam tòng, tứ đức” (or, “three obediences and four virtues”). A legacy of Confucious teaching, a woman is expected to obey their father, husband and son, and to have diligence, modest appearance, proper speech, and morality, implying their existence as an embodiment of the nation, the traditional value through the male gaze. As seen across many filmic productions, a woman is there, yet she never truly exists.
* Language: Vietnamese, with English subtitle
in between frames, i dream the dreams i have been dreaming
chapter 1: 07 pm – 08:30 pm, Wed 30 July 2025
chapter 1 follows the dreams of female characters who try to navigate their lives under the requirement of sacrificing for others, or “tam tòng” (“three obediences”), and here in most of the films, “tòng quân” (military enlistment). “Green Age” (Thái Thúc Hoàng Điệp, 1974) brings back the dynamics of the 1970s in Saigon, where girls fulfill their own desire in the life besides wartime. The chapter ends with “Song to the Front” (Nguyễn Trinh Thi, 2011), in which the artist reconstructs a propaganda film footage into a thriller featuring the woman as the antagonist/protagonist.
chapter 2: 05 pm – 06:15 pm, Sat 02 Aug 2025
In the second chapter, the screening follows films and video works in which women and female bodies blend in, exist, and witness the movement of rapid changes in landscape and throughout generations. In “The Voice is An Archive” (Hương Ngô, 2016), four generations of Vietnamese diaspora connect through language and identity by humming a lullaby repeatedly. This is then followed by “Worker’s Dream” (Trần Phương Thảo, 2006), a documentary that captures the reality of female workers as they search for a new life in the city. This chapter ends with “Ninh Bình – Saigon” (Ngọc Nâu, 2017), when the female figure only appears as mythical figures found in legends of migration.
About the artists & directors
Nguyễn Trinh Thi is a Hanoi-based filmmaker and artist. Traversing boundaries between film and video art, installation and performance, her practice currently explores the power of sound and listening, and the multiple relations between image, sound, and space, with ongoing interests in history, memory, representation, ecology, and the unknown.
Nguyen’s works have been shown at international festivals and exhibitions including documenta, Artes Mundi, Lyon Biennale, the Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art, Sydney Biennale, the Mori Art Museum, and Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial.
Ngọc Nâu is based in northern Vietnam. Through her work, she delves into social issues that are intertwined with technological progress – spirituality, land transformation and labor conditions – using these to reflect on the future, collective memory, and the human experience. Ngọc Nâu invites audiences to reconsider these narratives and engage in a dialogue about the complexities of contemporary existence. Ngọc Nâu’s works have been presented at: Hypnotising Chickens: Recent Video Art from Vietnam and Tasmania, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Australia, (2025); Ecological Art from Beneath, Gangwon International Triennale, South Korea (2024); Art Basel, Hong Kong (2023), Documenta15, Germany through SaSa art projects collective (2022); ThaiLand Biennale (2021), and Singapore Biennale (2019).
Hương Ngô is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. She was born in Hong Kong, holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art & Technology Studies (2004), and was a Whitney Independent Study Fellow (2011-2012). She was awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant in Vietnam (2016) for work that has been described as “deftly and defiantly decolonial” by New City and “what intersectional feminist art looks like” by the Chicago Tribune.
She has exhibited her solo and collaborative work at numerous institutions including more recently: Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO (2024); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023); Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO (2022), CAC Cincinatti, OH (2021); Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2020); The Factory Contemporary Art Centre, HCMC, VN (2020); Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2020); Phillips Collection, Washington DC (2019); MoMA, New York, NY (2018); Para Site, Hong Kong, SAR (2017); DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL (2017); Nhà Sàn Collective, Hanoi, VN (2016). Her collaboration with Hồng-Ân Trương is on long-term display at Chicago O’Hare’s International Airport, and her solo work is part of the permanent collections of the MoMA, DePaul Art Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, and Walker Art Center, among others. She was part of the Prague Biennial (2005) and Prospect.5 Triennial (2021).
She is currently a visiting lecturer at University of California Santa Barbara. She was recently an assistant professor of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she helped to institute the school’s first department-wide anti-racism committee. While living in France, she organized a series of artist lectures, UJVF Rencontre, in collaboration with Liem Binh Luong Nguyen and in cooperation with WoMA Paris.
Trần Phương Thảo (b. 1977, Hanoi, Vietnam) moved to France in 2000 to complete her dream of being a documentary filmmaker. After graduating in Political Science in Paris, she studied documentary film techniques and writing in Poitiers University. Back in Vietnam, she took part in the Varan Vietnam workshop where she directed “Workers Dream” which attended many international festivals and was awarded at Cinéma du Réel 2007 (P. Perrault Award).
Since 2011, she directed several documentary films in collaboration with Swann Dubus including “With or Without Me” (White Goose Award – DMZ Docs 2012) and “Finding Phong” (Grand Prix Nanook – Jean Rouch IFF 2016, Paris). Together they are exploring through their films major themes of Vietnamese society from a personal angle and producing young talented Vietnamese documentary filmmakers including Ha Le Diem’s debut feature film “Children of the Mist”. She supervises Varan Vietnam production company and is the head teacher in Varan Vietnam’s workshops.
Thái Thúc Hoàng Điệp is an Australian-Vietnamese film director of South Vietnamese cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. Emerging in Saigon during wartime, his interest was set on the youth and their daily life, exploring the complex transformation of urban citizens in a chaotic time instead of representing the violence of war. His works encapsulate the subtlety of feelings and ideologies that are often being lost due to grand narratives of power and war.
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