Trinh T. Minh-ha: Persistence of Vision Award + What About China?

Description

Filmmaker, writer, composer Trinh T. Minh-ha is a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work runs the gamut from feature films to multimedia installations to books. Her many awards include the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art; the 2006 Trailblazers Award at MIPDoc in Cannes, France; and the 1991 AFI National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award. This year’s POV program will feature Trinh T. Minh-ha in conversation with Rizvana Bradley, Assistant Professor of Film and Media at UC Berkeley, followed by the North American premiere of Minh-ha’s latest film, What About China?

Nearly a half century after the Cultural Revolution, images of the Asian superpower as friend or foe to a beleaguered, industrialized West belie a mercurial nature that fascinates in this latest video essay by esteemed UC Berkeley professor and experimental filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha. Similar to Forgetting Vietnam (2015), low-res video footage shot 30 years ago of Chinese rural life centering on women, children, labor, and family is reanimated and reframed through photomontage, oral histories, travelogues, poetry, and folk songs in order to interrogate what China has been, is, and could be. The generational transmission of values and ideas weighs heavily, impacting identity formation at home and in diaspora. Like seminal works, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Shoot for the Contents (1991), and Forgetting Vietnam (2015), the materiality of texts (video, sound, this film) captures the effect experienced by global citizenry.

Moderator Rizvana Bradley

Rizvana Bradley is assistant professor of film and media at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching focus on the study of film and media at the intersections of literature, poetry, contemporary art, and performance. Bradley’s scholarship has appeared in a wide range of academic publications, including Film Quarterly, Black Camera, and Discourse. Her book, Anteaesthetics, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. Before coming to UC Berkeley, Bradley was an Assistant Professor in the History of Art and African American Studies at Yale, an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality at Emory University, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of the History of Art at the University College London.

Director Trinh T. Minh-ha

A native of Vietnam, Trinh T. Minh-ha trained as a composer before turning to other pursuits, establishing herself as a filmmaker, literary theorist, writer, and educator. She is a professor in the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Among her films are Reassemblage (1982), Naked Spaces: Living is Round (Festival 1986), Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Shoot for the Contents (1991), A Tale of Love (1995), The Fourth Dimension (2001), Night Passage (2004), Forgetting Vietnam (2014), and What About China? (2021).

Film Details