cát nguyên

Vết Sẹo Lòng: Tiếng Ngân Nga Của Quê Nhà
Heart Scars, Where Homeland Hums (2026)

In 1917, Bùi Thạnh was born in Trung Phước, Quảng Nam. After he left for France at 20 years old, Bùi Thạnh never set foot in his village again, having been traumatized by the untimely death of his mother; his hometown then became an epicenter for grief when his father, step-mother, and 16 other relatives and neighbors were massacred by French colonizers during a targeted bombing. Forever far from his village, Bùi Thạnh spent 20 years in France studying visual arts and textiles; publishing revolutionary poems and underground pamphlets; and organizing the anti-colonial movement among the Vietnamese in France. Afterwards, he returned to Sài Gòn where he lived for another 20 years until 1975 when he resettled in the U.S. as a refugee following the end of American War in Vietnam. It is not until almost a century after Bùi Thạnh left his village that his daughter and grandchild, cát nguyên, would finally return to the village.

In the living video-performance-collage, “Heart Scars, Where Homeland Hums,” cát nguyên embodies their grandfather’s poetry alongside their own through mud calligraphy: the bountiful harvest of soil, sun, and soul from their family’s burial site. Their palms channel the rivers flowing within the smooth stone skin of a mortar and pestle carved of rock native to Quảng Nam. From the earth, cát nguyên divines ink, then incarnates their bloodlines onto ancient photographs, a hand-woven sedge mat, and banana leaves – corporeal transmission of memory and prophecy, déjà vu that travels generations.

What the fields and mountains of homeland engrave are not merely crops of tragedy, but rather a sky that offers ancestral reconnection. This poetic inscription-ceremony is therefore an organic, transcendent act of reintegration and regeneration, a poem that grandfather and grandchild have written throughout more than a century.

director: cát nguyên
writer: cát nguyên
director of photography: cát nguyên
editor: cát nguyên
sound designer: cát nguyên
lead cast: cát nguyên
vietnamese translator: bùi vũ phương thảo
đàn bầu artist: cát nguyên
producer: cát nguyên
filmed in việt nam

Hai Bà Cháu | Grandma-Grandchild (2025)

director: cát nguyên
writer: cát nguyên
director of photography: cát nguyên
editor: cát nguyên
sound designer: cát nguyên
lead cast: cát nguyên
vietnamese translator: linh linh thân
đàn tranh artist: cát nguyên
producer: cát nguyên
filmed in việt nam & u.s.a.

an entrancing dream-poem, Hai Bà Cháu | Grandma-Grandchild, is the lucid celestialization of the time-defying love shared by cát nguyên and their grandma.

bathing in an intergenerational dreamspace, this short film is the whimsical monsoon of a grandma’s tender and poetic presence that has emanated oceans beyond her bodily passing.

as cát nguyên caresses the very waves that both grandma and grandchild have crossed across decades, cát nguyên swims in all the blue shades of love to finally embrace, once more, and forevermore, their grandma.

Hai Bà Cháu | Grandma-Grandchild has screened at festivals, exhibitions, and events in hanoi, ho chi minh city, marseille, and minneapolis.

Thân Thể Rừng Thiêng | Landscape of Our Body (2024)

producers: cát nguyên & trâm anh nguyễn
director: trâm anh nguyễn
writer: cát nguyên
music composer & sound designer: trần quốc thịnh
director of photography: trâm anh nguyễn
lead cast: cát nguyên
vietnamese translator: tâm đỗ
đàn tranh artist: cát nguyên
set assistants: triết phạm & yến bùi
filmed in việt nam

what can we discover in the landscape of our bodies?

as queer trans and gender non-conforming children of the vietnamese diaspora, we are fragmented at the crossroads of being displaced from not only a sense of belonging to our ancestral land, but also our own bodies which are conditioned by society to stray away from our most authentic existence.

yet these bodies of ours are the vessels we sail to embark on a lifetime voyage of return to our original selves. it is our bodies that navigate the treacherous tides of normative systems that impose themselves on our very being. and it is our bodies that act as community lighthouses for collective liberation.

ultimately, the landscape of our bodies is our blueprint to remembering, to healing, to blooming.

Thân Thể Rừng Thiêng | Landscape of Our Body has screened at festivals, exhibitions, and events in berlin, brussels, paris, stockholm, toronto, vancouver, hanoi, and ho chi minh city.