Director: Ashley Da-Le Duong
It is difficult to watch Ba’s Book. For one thing, it unfolds slowly, and, once it gets off the ground, it occasionally loses focus. Yet its cathartic finale is powerful enough to make us reconsider the entire process. What initially feels like an ambivalent exercise in storytelling ultimately becomes something revelatory, transforming the film’s faltering spectator-character identification into an emotionally charged experience.
The film follows second-generation Vietnamese immigrant director Ashley Da-Le Duong as she revisits a deeply painful past shaped by the Vietnam War through the story of a family she has not seen since childhood. The project is set in motion by her distant relationship with her father, an engineer who emigrated to Canada after the war. Burdened by guilt and silence, he dedicates a book recounting his past to his daughter, making both the book and the film an attempt to bring closure to an intergenerational conflict spanning decades. While touching only tangentially on the socialist-capitalist divide, the film explores what it means to grow up in a family where taboos and untold secrets burden both parents and children, stunting emotional development and preventing reconciliation.
As she adapts her father’s book into a cinematic narrative, Da-Le travels to her parents’ birthplace and invites younger members of her extended Vietnamese family to play the people who populate her father’s memories. The result is an intriguing postmodern experiment in reconstructing the past through layers of mediation, while also attempting to reconcile her father with his extended family.
Some aspects of the story deserved more attention than they receive. We would have liked to learn more about the uncles who fought on opposing sides during the war, particularly given the film’s suggestion that allegiances to the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese government tore families apart. Instead, Da-Le builds her narrative from fragments connected by her father’s experiences, from survival and schooling to his long-winded yet fascinating escape to Canada via Iran, during the upheaval surrounding the Shah’s overthrow and the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran.
Held together by detailed glimpses of the filmmaking process, these fragments make for a compelling viewing experience, especially for audiences familiar with the lasting personal scars of postcolonial or postsocialist conflicts. Da-Le’s sophomore documentary feature also deserves praise for its effective use of reenactment, with young actors embodying the people and experiences of the past. In doing so, she joins a generation of filmmakers exploring family trauma through a process that can be understood as therapeutic. This approach draws viewers into the characters’ lived experiences and, at times, accelerates the otherwise difficult process of establishing identification between spectator and character.
Ba’s Book is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026 from 7-18 October.
