After rediscovering letters her father sent her from prison in 2005, the Czech Vietnamese filmmaker Diana Cam Van Nguyen was surprised to realise that she was never closer to him than during his year-long incarceration. Created 15 years later, her critically acclaimed short Love, Dad explores how generational, gender and cultural divides, as well as the distinct contours of their relationship, have opened a wide chasm between them in the years since.
In a stop-motion collage built from her father’s letters and actors captured in still frames, Nguyen creates a postcard-inflected, nostalgia-tinged aesthetic to recall how her father left her family after learning his second child – Nguyen’s younger sibling – would be another girl. Pondering their relationship, she intertwines this personal history with contemplations of what path their relationship might have taken if she had been born a boy herself. Mining her own life, Nguyen crafts a rich meditation on how the randomness of birth can mean loving, and therefore wanting to understand, deeply imperfect people and those with very different values than our own.
