Title: Still Night, Burning House
Foreign Title:
Year: 2026
Country: Canada
Language: In English and Vietnamese with English subtitles
Director: Carol Nguyen
Click here to see the cast and crew
In her cinematic debut, Carol Nguyen delivers a beautiful and compelling documentary that avoids many of the clichés and pitfalls of its subject, leading us toward a deeply personal and poetic film.
With patience and sensitivity, Nguyen painstakingly unfolds the story of her uncle’s death, the trauma, remorse and regret that followed, the collapse of the family, and eventually, the beginning of a healing process following the revelation of long-buried family secrets and personal guilt.
Being immigrants is difficult. Families tend to bond together, taking care of one another in a new place. But the death of Nguyen’s uncle, following a long struggle with mental illness, changed the equation. A family that had once been remarkably close began to drift apart. The second-generation lost touch. Nobody talked about what had happened until Nguyen began opening old wounds.
Armed with medical files and years of recorded interviews with her uncle during his treatment, and using a variety of documentary techniques, Nguyen slowly guides her family toward a place where they can begin to speak openly about what happened and about their own feelings, unveiling history of living in the shadow of illness not very known and understood, in a new country, with a foreign culture.
If the first part of the film is built around individual interviews, each one hesitant and just touching the surface, the second unfolds through a family reunion after many years, and a journey back to Vietnam, the first visit since they left. Intergenerational and intercultural questions emerge. The parents find comfort in a place they left long ago, while their daughters begin to discover and connect with a culture they barely know, yet which has been embedded in them. Gradually, glimpses of healing begin to appear.
It is a deeply intimate film, but it never feels intrusive. Nguyen’s camera is as calm and gentle as her interviews. She does not rush to conclude the story. Instead, she patiently leads us, and the family, toward a new beginning.
