by Ravi Chandra
photos courtesy of the Center for Asian American Media

Director Thu Ha Vu’s new film Kieu is bold in scope. A modern-day adaptation of the Vietnamese epic poem Tale of Kieu, the film depicts the life of a massage parlor worker in San Francisco. I caught up with Thu Ha before the world premiere of Kieu at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) to talk about the film. Here, Thu Ha reveals an interesting backstory on the making of Kieu and shares some insight on the women who inspired her.

NHA: Congratulations on premiering your film at the Festival—that’s huge! I just checked, and your show is sold out already.

THV: Before it even hit the box office. We’ve been begging people to give up their tickets [so the cast and crew can go to the show].

NHA: That’s great. Hopefully they’ll add more screenings. [More shows were added later.]

THV: Have you seen a movie with a Vietnamese crowd before?

NHA: No, not yet, I just saw the press screener.

THV: You should experience that at some point—it’s memorable. It’s like watching a movie with your parents in the living room. They’ll talk out loud and have separate conversations that may or may not have anything to do with the film!

NHA: What do you think they’ll be saying during your film?

THV: Oh, “That girl can’t speak Vietnamese, or can’t do this or that,” or “I remember escaping by boat.” Or maybe “That’s not the Tale of Kieu!”

NHA: Wow.

THV: Yeah, ‘cause people are expecting a remake of the Tale itself, which is something I wouldn’t dare do.

NHA: How did you come to adapt the Tale of Kieu?

THV: I didn’t grow up with it, but a lot of [Vietnamese] people did. A lot of massage parlor workers who I got to know over two and a half years before we went into production, they taught me about the Tale of Kieu.

NHA: So you learned it from them?

THV: Mainly. I heard about it maybe 11 years ago, through Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s A Tale of Love but I never read the tale or investigated it further until I started making the film. When I got a grant to work with massage parlor workers, to tell their stories through film, they often compared themselves to Kieu, the heroine in Truyen Kieu or the Tale of Kieu. It’s a 19th century epic poem written by Nguyen Du. He wrote the story about Vuong Thuy Kieu, who was sold from brothel to brothel. Basically she did sex work. She went into prostitution to earn money to save her family. It was so much about her sacrifice and her spiritual intactness. Her spirit and story are very well celebrated in Viet Nam. It’s considered the national epic. I was told by several sources that it was also a metaphor for Chinese colonization of Viet Nam as well, but that’s a whole other topic. The surface level is that she’s a symbol of the Vietnamese woman who sacrificed for her family.