Love, Dad

As a child, Diana was separated from her father for a year when he ended up in prison. But the distance was easily bridged by the letters he wrote to her, and she to him. Separation came again later in her life, when her father left the family for good. This time there was no more contact between them.

Now an adult, Diana attempts to revive her relationship with her father by writing a letter, in the form of a film. It is a process interwoven with personal struggle. She wants to forgive him and lovingly reincorporate him in her life, but she resents the traditional Vietnamese culture, traditions, and norms that drove him away from her.

The film’s director Diana Cam Van Nguyen makes ingenious use of the letter as a medium to connect past events with present desires. She uses a hybrid blend of archive photography and animation to evoke the atmosphere of a literary interior monologue veering from remembrance to denunciation to invocation.