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Carol Nguyen’s Still Night, Burning House to make world premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival

PRESS RELEASE
05/08/2026

August 5, 2026 – Toronto – National Film Board of Canada (NFB)

Vietnamese-Canadian filmmaker Carol Nguyen’s feature documentary debut, Still Night, Burning House, will have its world premiere in the Toronto International Film Festival’s TIFF Docs program, featuring the year’s best non-fiction filmmaking.

In this Metafilms, National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and Portage Films co-production, the director’s Toronto family travels to Vietnam, where they face long-unspoken questions about an uncle’s mysterious death.

The Montreal-based filmmaker’s most personal work to date, Still Night, Burning House is the follow-up and companion to her award-winning 2019 short No Crying at the Dinner Table, which was named to Canada’s Top Ten, TIFF’s annual list of the country’s finest films.

The festival will also host the September 16 world premiere of the NFB/TIFF short documentary initiative REDEFINED, in which five next-generation filmmakers from across the country explore the diversity of Canadian and Indigenous identity and celebrate the differences that unite us as a country.

TIFF 2026 runs September 10–20.

About Carol Nguyen’s Still Night, Burning House (76 min)
Producers: Audrey-Ann Dupuis-Pierre (Portage Films); Robert Vroom and Ariel Nasr (NFB)
Executive producers: Sylvain Corbeil (Metafilms), Nathalie Cloutier (NFB), Bob Moore (EyeSteelFilm) and Anh Duy Vo Dinh (Spotlight Production)
Press kit: mediaspace.nfb.ca/epk/still-night-burning-house 

In Still Night, Burning House, Carol Nguyen chronicles her family’s first gathering since her uncle’s mysterious death over a decade ago. 

Travelling together to Vietnam, the family embarks on a transformative journey through intergenerational trauma, mental health and deeply layered loss. With profound care, trust and immediacy, Nguyen guides them as they navigate unsealed medical records and long-unspoken questions. How can we grieve if we’ve never been given the chance to be sad?

Still haunted by guilt, Nguyen’s father’s search for answers via collective rituals and solitary meanderings soon leads him into the uncanny.

A metaphysical poem for complex mourning, Nguyen’s feature debut shows how storytelling can turn grief and regret into healing, hope and a kinship restored. 

About the filmmaker

Carol Nguyen is a Montreal-based, Vietnamese-Canadian filmmaker whose films explore themes of cultural identity, family and silence. Her short film Nanitic (2022) was screened at the Berlinale and TIFF. No Crying at the Dinner Table (2019) was shown at TIFF, IDFA and South by Southwest, where it won the Jury Prize for Short Documentary. Carol is currently working on several projects, including a feature-length fiction selected for the TIFF Writer’s Studio in 2025.

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Press release – PDF here.

Version française ici.

Media Relations

  • About the NFB

    Founded in 1939, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is a one-of-a-kind producer, co-producer and distributor of engaging, relevant and innovative documentary and animated films. As a talent incubator, it is one of the world’s leading creative centres. The NFB has enabled Canadians to tell and hear each other’s stories for over eight decades, and its films are a reliable and accessible educational resource. The NFB is also recognized around the world for its expertise in preservation and conservation, and for its rich and vibrant collection of works, which form a pillar of Canada’s cultural heritage. To date, the NFB has produced more than 14,000 works, 7,000 of which can be streamed free of charge at nfb.ca. The NFB and its productions and co-productions have earned over 7,000 awards, including 12 Oscars and an Honorary Academy Award for overall excellence in cinema.