Jeffrey Brown:
He grew up in Oklahoma, Texas and Southern California hearing stories of his homeland. And after college and art school, he went back to Vietnam to live with his maternal grandmother, a poet, writer and journalist who had stayed behind.
Nguyen has lived in Vietnam ever since, now with a family of his own. And he's made films about other continuations of history, French colonial soldiers from Senegal who fought in Vietnam and had relationships and children with Vietnamese women.
He worked with the contemporary Senegalese-Vietnamese community in Dakar to document part of that little-known story. And he's crafted other works about mixed communities and migrations we rarely hear of. He himself has relatives in Martinique in the Caribbean that date to French colonial wars.
For all this, he credits the stories he was told in childhood.
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