My grandmother’s determined spirit and lyrical diary serenade this family road memoir. Made by children of the Vietnamese diaspora, coming home to themselves through ancestral dreams on a water stage.
PHANTOM ROOTS is delivered in fragments because the nature of diaspora has cast us to the wind. The texture of this film is that of a woven basket gathering scattered memories and reimagined archives to locate the healing forces of everyday magic. My name is Erica Nguyen, and I am a first generation Vietnamese-American filmmaker. I have seen how rapidly cultural anchors can be severed. I feel the wounds of that erasure calling to be reconstructed. A loose translation of the word “Viet” literally means “people” but its origins refer to those who cross over obstacles. These are some of my family members who overcome otherness.
The story opens in the flooded rice fields, where water becomes a stage for bamboo puppets to reenact the spirited writings of my grandmother Xuan. Her affinity for folk theater is realized nearly 50 years later through my reimagining of her diary; in which she reflected on a lifetime of displacement. Observing this performance of personal history, we locate the taproot that birthed the next generation.
My father Duc, was born the year Ho Chi Minh became the official Northern leader of the Communist Party (1960). As a teenage transplant in America, he taught his 55 year old mother how to read & write. Now a father of 3 himself, Duc escapes the enormous grids of circuitry he designs as a microchip engineer to pull giant fish from the depths of the sea. His choreographed techniques for catching bluefin tuna mirror his mother’s admiration for marionette play. Flying fish, a helium balloon, and a kite are rigged to mimic the water dance on display for the hungry tuna. The spoils of which are composted into the terraformed fruit gardens surrounding his home in Little Saigon, California. Scenes of community life and transformation burst with vibrancy.
“Mất nước” is a Vietnamese phrase for lost country. It comes with a double meaning- to be without water. The high deserts of the Southwest have been my chosen home for the past decade. It is here that I reflect on my bloodline. Trinh T. Minh-ha asks in her film Surname Viet Given Name Nam, “But if I don’t have roots, why have my roots made me suffer so?” My documentary attends to rising AAPI mental health needs that revolve around disconnection. By sewing the present together with my family’s ancestral fortitude, I seek an intimate sense of wholeness that may better safeguard our futures.
The film closes with a pilgrimage. While my first trip to Vietnam (2022) was a homecoming dream realized, it also became my first experience of leaving. Our flight path departed along the Mekong Delta, where soil stained rivers meet the crisp blue stretch of sea. I myself am gently infused with two cultural halves of a whole. Sometimes there is harmonious diffusion while in others stark lines are drawn that I must accept- to be both insider & outsider at once. Where might fragmentation create joyful mosaics?
