Van Tran Nguyen is an artist, scholar, curator, filmmaker, and assistant professor in the Department of Performing Arts at Georgetown University. Her practice is based in writing, performance, and installation, and the use of the body and presence to build dialogue and prompt questions about representation, symbolism, and iconography.

Tran Nguyen’s debut feature-length film, The Motherload, is presented as part of the Vilcek Foundation’s New American Perspectives program at the 2024 Hawai’i International Film Festival. The Motherload is a narrative following a Vietnamese American mother and daughter—Kim and Jessica—living in Western New York, as they navigate their relationships to the United States, to Vietnam, and to one another. Jessica works as a translator on a public broadcast television show offering film critiques; in the episode she is working on as the film starts, two critics watch and review films about the American war in Vietnam. 

The Motherload uses parallel narratives to explore the way ideas about Vietnam and the American war there have been misinformed and shaped by Hollywood—from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket to Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Tran Nguyen and her mother, Sang Tran, play all the roles in the film, from Jessica and Kim to the film critics to the characters of the films critiqued.

The concept of embodiment

As an artist and curator, Tran Nguyen engages embodiment, presence, and the use of her own body to draw attention to, and to challenge ideas about idolized places and concepts. A visit to Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. and seeing her own face reflected in the surface of the wall sparked a series of performances, begun in 2014; in these performances, Tran Nguyen records herself gazing at her reflection in the wall, while cleaning the surface with a cloth and water. The theme of using the body to tell stories comes through in other installations, from her 2015 performance in collaboration with Cheng Cheng, Take Care of Me, Take Care of You, to her 2016 performance and installation with Schoolyard Arts, Model Minority.

Reflecting on her practice, Tran Nguyen says, “It opens a pathway for me to think about the consequences of what my body brings to these conversations.” She recalls, “What I make uncomfortable, what I make complicated, with my body: It complicates the very question of representation.” 

The power of satire

In The Motherload, the absurdity of the dialogue, misogyny, and fictions of films about the American war in Vietnam is writ large as Tran Nguyen satirizes and skewers them. The dialogue of the original films is unchanged, as Tran Nguyen embodies the characters and uses cardboard helicopters, cigarettes, and homemade props to deconstruct the fictions of these films and complicate ideas of Vietnam, war, propaganda, violence, gender, and identity.

The concept for the film grew out of Tran Nguyen’s own review of these films during the COVID pandemic as she sought to critique how this lexicon shaped her own perceptions. 

“Humor and satire does something really interesting to power: It challenges it,” says Tran Nguyen. “Power looks ridiculous if satire is involved.” In The Motherload, the artist and filmmaker does this to brilliant effect, holding the films and filmmakers accountable, and contextualizing the dystopian and generational violence of the genre.