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Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989)
one of the best movies i've ever seen
"Surname Viet, Given Name Nam" is a rare document/reenactment in that it captures the voices of southern Vietnamese women at a time when the Vietnamese nation-state was undergoing rapid political-economic transformation that worked in different ways to structurally include and exclude, connect and separate, women--apparently, increasingly differentiating "persons" according to gendered terms. There are few records of the southern Vietnamese woman's perspective, especially in English. What is notable to me about the English renderings is that they require the viewer/listener to be active, to move into the text as one might in a transnational setting where communication with the speaker is valued, recognizing even still the ways this kind of action privileges the use of English. With such an acknowledgment, this film becomes Trinh's--and her intervewee/actors'--gift of translation to the rest of us.