Atelier Céladon

Join us for a screening of two films by queer vietnamese american filmmaker Quyên Nguyen-Le. Nước and Queer Vietnameseness are two different projects exploring the ways in which imagining our futures as diasporic queer vietnamese people often intersects with experiencing the past of war and intergenerational trauma as a continuation into the present. The screening will be followed by a discussion about how the fragmented and anachronous process of filmmaking can be a way of building networks of solidarity and connection among queer vietnamese people in the diaspora.

Queer Vietnameseness (documentary) follows the lives of three queer second generation Vietnamese American womxn (Nat Newton, Rosi Nghiem, Shannon My Le), navigating language, politics, and familial relationships — their stories add dimensions to Vietnamese diasporic experiences in community organizing, family, work in nail salons, and living in Little Saigon, Orange County, California.

Nước (short film) is an experimental narrative short film about a queer Vietnamese American teen who attempts to piece together and understand their mom's experience as a Vietnam War refugee. The journey pulls us into a fantastical series of iconic historical photographs, ultimately highlighting the complexity of understanding another's experiences completely and instead opening up possibilities for building relationships based on being presence and co-existence.

Quyên Nguyen-Le (they - she) is a queer Vietnamese American filmmaker from Los Angeles, California, in the process of figuring out how to sustainably converge technical filmmaking with social justice and tender emotions. After a brief stint at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Quyên completed degrees in Comparative Literature and Philosophy/ Politics/ Law at USC; then moved to Santiago de Chile to study Spanish with an emphasis on international politics. Quyên is also a graduate of the Los Angeles Inner-City Filmmakers program and the the Emma L. Bowen Foundation program at Focus Features/ NBCUniversal. In recent years, Quyên has graduated college, directed a film for James Franco's The Labyrinth anthology, and finished their first feature documentary, Queer Vietnameseness.