by Do Le Anhdao
photos by Kato Takanobu
and courtesy of Duc Nguyen

Duc Nguyen can be quite intimidating. Not in a physical or egocentric way. In fact, he is soft-spoken in his speech and refined in his manners, amicable and approachable. He is intimidating in a way that makes you wonder why you haven’t done more with your life. After discovering the vastness of his knowledge and wisdom and what he has given back to his community, you start to make comparisons. He is an achiever. And you start to feel a little under-whelmed with yourself.

By the age of 40, Nguyen has racked up an impressive list of uncommon careers. He’s been a scenic painter, a health study tour delegate, and a television tech producer among others. Nguyen has a degree in Mass Communications from the University of California at Berkeley and several years of filmmaking experience under his belt. He thinks of himself as a storyteller and lives by the mantra “tell it like it is.” Nguyen is working on a documentary called Bolinao 52, a film that shines a light on the saga of the Vietnamese boat people from the survivors’ perspectives.

The making of Nguyen’s first documentary happened almost purely by chance. In December 1999, he joined a delegation to visit Cuba for a Health and Healing study tour. His mission was to document the event. He packed his camera equipment with an open mind. At the time, the protests in Havana demanding the return of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez were featured on television news daily. When Nguyen arrived in Cuba, the Gonzalez case had taken the island by storm and he began to record heated events relating to the story.

“What I’ve experienced in Cuba was quite different from my preconceived notion according to the portrayal of this country by the American mainstream media,” says Nguyen.

The eye-opening trip resulted in a film called Mediated Reality that reveals the Cuban perspective behind the Elian saga. His work in Mediated Reality opened his eyes to how powerful the media can be.

“Things on television are shown through a filter and do not completely portray reality,” Nguyen concludes.

He believes that journalism in the media has gone in a direction towards commercialism.

“The people who control mainstream media, who I call ‘the gatekeepers’, aren’t following the journalistic doctrine of showing all sides of the story; so I wanted to make a film that shows the juxtaposition of what I saw in Cuba and what they were showing on TV,” says Nguyen.

He further explains that “you see a lot of drama in the news now, and in drama you have to portray people in symbolic ways, in a black and white picture.” Nguyen also states that this isn’t a recent circumstance. He remembers that there was little to no representation of Asian identities when he was growing up.