Christopher Radcliff & Cathy Linh Che

The Architecture of Memory & Frame​

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The jury noted that the film offers a “Vietnamese gaze on Hollywood, reversed.” What was the process of dismantling a cinematic monument like Apocalypse Now, effectively turning a master narrative of war into an intimate, personal family archive?

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Cathy Linh Che: When we began the process, we knew that this was a story that deserved to be told. I didn’t necessarily see this as a dismantling of Apocalypse Now, as much as a way to include more voices and perspectives into the larger narrative of the Vietnam War. On scale, even though my parents have lived epic lives, they have always conveyed their journey to me intimately, at the dinner table, or in the living room. We wanted the film to maintain that domestic and familial feel.

Christopher Radcliff: Likewise, my focus wasn’t necessarily on dismantling Apocalypse Now. I was just captivated by the story of Cathy’s parents and I wanted to find a way to evoke their perspectives and tell it as truthfully as possible. In a way, that meant setting aside Apocalypse Now in order to prioritize the larger sweep of their journey from Vietnam as refugees and letting the experiences they had during the film’s production manifest in our film in a way that is similar to how they function in Cathy’s family’s lore. This naturally created a dynamic where the frame became reversed, and this huge totemic film became a footnote in their lives.

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The film's title speaks directly to cinematic and historical erasure: refugees reduced to silent background scenery. How did you work with the narration of Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che to reclaim their truth from the margins of the frame, transforming passive extras into active keepers of history?

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C.L.C.: My parents Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che have always been active keepers of history; but this history was confined to my household. I wanted to share their story with a larger audience. The truth is that my parents were never passive as extras; it was the vantage point that diminished them.

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We sought to change the point of view to ensure that they were the center of the story, that they were the agents of their own lives. We approached this collaboratively. Chris and I developed a series of questions together. I had intimate knowledge of my parents’ stories––after all, they’d relayed them to me hundreds of times before, so I knew the questions that would generate the lines and sentences that were most interesting to me (and to them!). Chris, as someone who is not of my family, had his own curiosities. I think the combination of insider knowledge and outsider curiosity generated full and interesting interview responses.

“My parents were never passive as extras; it was the vantage point that diminished them. We sought to change the point of view to ensure that they were the center of the story.”

— Cathy Linh Che

C.R.: Cathy’s parents are naturally fantastic storytellers, so it was clear to me from very early on that foregrounding their voices, and allowing their narration to guide the film, would be tremendously valuable. It became the basis of the entire film, and it was the first thing I edited. Then the visuals were determined to compliment or amplify this.

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In terms of the recording of the narration, Cathy’s mom was excited to help, and we sat with her in their home for several days recording what in hindsight was a very natural conversation between a mother and a daughter. Cathy’s father on the other hand was a bit more skeptical of our presence initially, but once he sat down for our first interview, his entire story came out over the course of a long, largely unprompted monologue. I learned a lot through this about how much people appreciate an opportunity to tell their stories, and to be listened to.

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Utilizing the family's own VHS copy of Apocalypse Now—recorded directly from a television broadcast—adds a profound layer of emotional and political texture. How did blending Super 8, low-res home archives, and modern verité footage inform the rhythmic and aesthetic language of the film?

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C.L.C.: Though the film is 15 minutes long, it spans decades. It includes footage from my family’s lives in America in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and it also includes footage captured during my return trip to Vietnam in 2022. The different textures speak to technology, memory, video archives, and the movement of time. Time converges in numerous ways. We can access their video recording now, 50 years after the end of the war, and it tells a story necessarily about numerous passages of time.

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C.R.: When Cathy told me that her parent’s only copy of Apocalypse Now is a VHS recording of a public broadcast of the film from the early 90s, I knew immediately that this would be the only version of the film that I’d want to use. It just made instinctual sense that we would only see the film the way they do. So this made the beautifully degraded texture of the tape, and all its imperfections, something to be embraced.

The home video archive that Cathy’s family had kept also became a guiding source for the film and I was really amazed by its quality - Cathy’s father has no real filmmaking ambition (he says so in the film) but he inadvertently captured a record of his family, his community, a time and a place, in a way that we never could. With the modern day footage we shot, I wanted to add the perspective of the present, the perspective of a daughter, someone from the diaspora who was raised in America and is seeing Vietnam, and the Philippines, through this very particular lens. So that’s what we tried to evoke when we were filming. And Jess X. Snow, our cinematographer and producer, suggested Super 8 as a way to capture the present that also bridges the past. This ended up being crucial in allowing the film to sort of collapse the past, present, cinema, and memory in the way it does.