Nguyen Trinh Thi is a Vietnamese filmmaker and media artist widely known for her position as a key interlocutor of Vietnam’s independent cinema and one of the country’s most daring and experimental creatives in the post-war period.
T. Nguyen’s path towards the moving image rests upon the foundation of her early interests in journalism and the study of languages. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Russian and English from the Hanoi Foreign Studies College (1994), and two master’s degrees, in journalism, and international relations, from the University of Iowa (1999) and University of California, San Diego (2005) respectively. While in the United States, her encounter with photography and ethnographic films became a decisive moment in the artist’s career, prompting a segue into a serious engagement with cinematic language. Her first film Love Man Love Woman (2007) builds on these eclectic inspirations to spotlight Master Luu Ngoc Duc, one of Hanoi’s most renowned spirit mediums, thus unpacking the ways in which Vietnam’s Mother Goddess Religion doubles as a space of community and haven for gay men in an otherwise homophobic society.

In later projects, T. Nguyen is known for her personal and poetic experimentation with the moving image, often dealing with Vietnam’s complex histories before and after 1975. In her works, original footage, press photographs, archival records and appropriated snapshots from popular culture find new lives in the artist’s trademark language of montage. In its treatment of repurposed footage from the funeral of a politically disgraced poet, Mùa xuân đến mùa đông sau [Spring Comes Winter After, 2008] exemplifies this multimodal approach and contextualizes the moving image as a site of confrontation with unspoken truths in contemporary Vietnamese society. Biên niên sử của một băng ghi lại [Chronicle of a Tape Recorded Over, 2010] and Những lá thư Panduranga [Letters from Panduranga, 2015] build on this momentum to explore the discursive potentials of field-based and collaborative image-making. During this period, T. Nguyen also experimented with video installation and performance art in works such as UNSUBTITLED (2010) and SOLO for a CHOIR (2013).

Themes of forgetting and remembering, inherited memories and wilful amnesia surfaced in her other genre-bending works. In Vietnam The Movie (2016), T. Nguyen delivered a scathing commentary on the role of visual culture in the maintenance of collective memory in and about her native Vietnam. Her most recent work, And They Die a Natural Death (2023), brings T. Nguyen’s trademark style to bear on the trauma of political imprisonment, drawing from the still banned autobiographical novel of writer Bui Ngoc Tan (1934–2014) entitled Chuyện kể năm 2000 [Tale Told in the Year 2000, 2000].
In her eclectic career, T. Nguyen has made a mark for Vietnamese independent cinema in the global structure of contemporary art. Beyond her career as an independent filmmaker and media artist, T. Nguyen is also regarded as an important advocate for independent cinema and artistic expressions in Vietnam. In 2009, T. Nguyen founded Hanoi Doclab, an artist-run center for community building and innovation in the field of filmmaking and the moving image in Hanoi.