Told through an exchange of letters between two artists, August Letters is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and inheritance — as one reckons with her father’s death and the quiet distance from the living, the other traces the generations shaped by loss within her own family.
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OVERSHARE FESTIVAL, Testing Grounds, Melbourne, Australia, 2023
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FRACTURED LENS: MEMORY, ARCHIVE, AND PHOTOGRAPHY AT AN INTERSECTION, screening & artist talk, Sàn Art, Saigon, Vietnam, 2023
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SCREENING, Kyoto International Film and Art Festival, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 2023
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TILL LATER LETTERS, Group Exhibition, Á Space, Vietnam, 2022
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VISUAL DOCUMENTARY PROJECT, Kyoto University, Best of 2021​​​
// DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT//
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Every August, I live between two anniversaries: my father’s death and my nephew’s birth. The month represents the split between loss and continuation — between what ends and what insists on beginning again. August Letters came from this tension.
I invited artist Xuân Hạ to make this film with me. I wasn’t ready to face this material alone. I don’t believe in closure. When someone you love dies, something in you leaves with them. That absence becomes part of how you move through the world. You carry it, not to fix it, but to acknowledge it.
For six years, I avoided the photographs from my father’s funeral. I had dismissed the idea of documenting it. When my sister asked me to invite a friend to take photos, I resisted. It felt wrong to put mourning on display. I wanted to protect my grief from being seen.
But eventually, I returned to the images. In looking at them again, arranging them, working them into this film, I saw something I hadn’t before. Not just the weight of loss, but how it had shaped me.
August Letters isn’t a complete story. It doesn’t aim to resolve or explain. It holds the contradictions between death and birth, detachment and connection. Some fragments were left out. No film can hold everything. But this is a record — of feeling, of memory, of two people writing their way through it.
