A Metafilms, National Film Board of Canada and Portage Films co-production

In Carol Nguyen’s feature debut, a family journeys to Vietnam, where together they face long-unspoken questions about an uncle’s mysterious death.

Short Synopsis

In her deeply personal debut feature, award-winning filmmaker Carol Nguyen charts her family’s first reunion since her uncle’s mysterious death. Travelling together to Vietnam, the family embarks on a revelatory—and at times uncanny—journey through intergenerational trauma and many-layered loss. With care and probing curiosity, Nguyen guides her loved ones as they navigate unsealed medical records and a decades-long silence, ultimately leading them back to each other. A metaphysical poem for complex mourning, Still Night, Burning House shows how storytelling can transform grief into collective healing.

Long synopsis

In her most personal work yet, filmmaker 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 companion to the award-winning short No Crying at the Dinner Table, Still Night, Burning House marks the feature debut of Vietnamese-Canadian filmmaker Carol Nguyen. A metaphysical poem for complex mourning, Nguyen’s film shows how storytelling can turn grief and regret into healing, hope and a kinship restored.

TW: This film contains discussions of suicide, and the effects on survivors of suicide loss. If you need support services, please call your local Distress Centre. If you need immediate help, please call or text 9-8-8.

Interview conducted by Ellen Orme Adams  

Could you talk a bit about what sparked this film?  

I had always wondered about what exactly happened the day my Uncle Thach passed—why he acted the way he did, how he died. His death was a mystery in my paternal family and also the catalyst for our rupture. Our families stopped talking.  

In 2019, I heard my dad speak about my uncle in a very open, intimate and detailed manner for the first time in my film No Crying at the Dinner Table. Hearing my dad’s feelings of guilt and his openness to finally talk about it motivated me to dive deeper and use it as a point of reconciliation in my paternal family. Making Still Night, Burning House gave us a reason and a safe space to come back together. It became the excuse—the ignition—our family needed to reconcile. Additionally, it gave us a reason to take a family trip to Vietnam, where the two generations could connect over untold stories.   

I didn’t want to tell another story about “going back home to the motherland” or “war trauma.” I wanted to push the Vietnamese-diaspora narrative, where there are other things that shaped our experience when visiting what we call “the motherland.”  

How did the story evolve?  

Having never made a feature before, I quickly learned how beautifully messy it can be. I entered the film with a very tight framework: it was to be a story about my Uncle Thach and my dad’s guilt. Very quickly, I came to understand that my preparation could only provide the skeletal focus. The story was writing itself in real time as we were pulled and inspired by serendipitous discoveries during our Vietnam trips. The most beautiful moments in the film were unplanned, including Jennifer’s confession at the end.  

What role does silence play in your film’s exploration of mourning?  

One of my questions when making the film was whether these rituals, and having a certain dependence on them, also prevent us from dealing with our grief in a more communicative and direct way with our loved ones. When praying with an incense stick or burning objects, you never really share what you’re thinking. These rituals give solace, but they also maintain silence. Entering this film, I was like, “Oh, we should all talk, and silence is not good.” Now I see that some people need that gentle solitude.  

There are so many contradictions in grief. My dad didn’t believe there was anything after death, and he believes all this joss paper and incense is fake, but he also engages in them. It shows us both the beauty and the absurdity of these created grief aids. Oftentimes our grief latches onto narratives to help us overcome the mystery of what we’ll never have the answers to—and to connect us to a world where our loved ones are now.  

Still Night, Burning House includes some surprising—and stunning!—metaphysical elements. What inspired that part of your filmmaking?  

I’m fascinated by how storytelling can heal. Incomplete stories can still have an ending. In creating the ghost world in the film, I could physically put my dad into a narrative where he finds some border to the afterlife, something spiritual. I wanted him to find that for himself, a place where he can have a little bit more hope and heal from his guilt.  

With the oxen, I didn’t know their narrative role in the ghost world or the film—I just had to follow that instinct. They emerged during the development shoot early in the morning while it was still dark. Juliette, my DOP, and I were wandering the beach when all of a sudden we saw these figures walking down the hill. We couldn’t tell what the animals were, and we wondered: “What is going on? Are we in the afterlife?” We decided to get the camera and shoot. It was so magical, seeing these oxen at the crack of dawn, not knowing what they were doing here on a secluded beach with these carts attached to them. Later, our fixer in Vietnam helped us track down those men and their oxen. These humble creatures, transporting something or someone—they gave us the material to build the ghost world.  

How do you approach trust in your filmmaking?  

Before we even started filming, I talked with my family to see if they were even open to sharing certain aspects of their life. I showed them that I was there because of a genuine desire to know their story and to create an experience for our family, not just for the film.  

There are a lot of problems with extraction in the history of documentary. I wanted to be there for the right reasons, to be present in the way that they need me to be, including when they express their discomfort non-verbally. When I point a camera at someone in an interview, it’s like, “I want to know about you. This is your time to speak. No one’s going to interrupt you. You can tell me where you want to stop, and you can take all the time and space you need.”  

How did making this film shift your relationship with your father?  

The whole film is a love letter to my dad: telling him I care about him, that I see his pain, that I’ve seen all his pain throughout all these years. While we still struggle with direct communication sometimes, now there is this unspoken knowingness, this understanding, this empathy. We see each other even in the silences.  

My dad is the only person who saw the film before we picture locked. I was really nervous. I wanted his approval! After he saw it, he just looked at me and said, “It’s a good film, girl.” And that was enough. He said he had to go home and think about it. Later, he said, “Why do you keep on making sad films? You should try an action movie next time!”  

What understanding do you hope audiences will gain about mental illness?  

In Vietnamese, we often refer to people with mental illnesses as being “sick.” My family experienced language and cultural barriers that made mental-health education very hard to obtain—from the stigma in the Vietnamese community, to the lexicon that we use around mental illness, to the pressures of being an immigrant.  

Knowing that Uncle Thach had a diagnosis of schizophrenia—what that did physiologically and psychologically to him—allows us to extend our empathy. That knowledge helps us deal with the “what ifs” more easily when we know how far we can extend those questions.  

I would love it if my film gave people the courage to be able to talk about mental illness and their families a little bit more openly, as scary as that can be. That connection would be very meaningful to me. It would transcend the story itself.  

At the opening of the film, your father says, “If I had understood more, it probably wouldn’t have ended that way.” What might Still Night, Burning House teach us about guilt and regret?  

It really hit me, too, when he said that. My dad wasn’t very educated about my uncle’s illness. There was so much about his illness that my dad didn’t know—and that he was not able to know.   

I can only relate to that journey of self-forgiveness as a second-hand experience of my dad’s, but I think at one point, you have to give yourself grace. The “what ifs” have to settle. You have to find your own answers for why things happened that way. That’s something I’m very interested in with this film, that meaning-making. No one else can tell you what these experiences mean or how they should have turned out. It’s an entirely personal journey.