Au Revoir, Saïgon
2026 · 2m
Directed by Alex Vinh
Genres: biography, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Vinh, twenty-five, films his Vietnamese grandmother Nga, eighty-eight, over the course of a day as she shares her memories before her memory fades.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a memory film, sure, but Vinh could've made this treacly and safe—instead he's betting everything on duration, on sitting with someone's voice until you stop performing for the camera. That's either brave or self-indulgent, and honestly I'm still not sure which.
There's a restraint here that reads like genuine curatorial thinking: the refusal to score emotional beats, to cut away from silence, to give us the *shape* of how memory actually dissolves rather than narrate it. Sits cleanly in a lineage of intimate documentary practice.
Two minutes with an eighty-eight-year-old's voice, unmediated—Vinh made the choice to let *her* rhythm dictate the edit instead of subsuming it into his own, and that single decision about who controls the pacing transforms this from dutiful family archive into something genuinely alive.