A project about Vietnamese identities across borders.
A cooperation of the Goethe-Institut Vietnam & the literary online magazine Zzz Review.
Four second-generation Vietnamese writers from the Czech Republic, Germany, France and the US, and five young authors from the North and the South of Vietnam write short plays of five minutes length on what Vietnam means to them. Each piece draws upon personal experience and questions of cultural identity.
Each piece will be performed in a non-theater-space that will be AV-recorded. The plays will be performed and filmed in the language of the respective writers. Each audio-visual recording will be subtitled in English, Vietnamese and German and placed online onto the project-landing page of the Goethe-Institut. This creates a basis for an important cultural dialogue across boundaries.
This fundraising serves to finance the five plays by the Vietnamese authors. The four productions from Germany, France, the Czech Republic and the USA are financially secure.
A Buddhist nun recalls her past lives, which span over myths and realities, fiction and nonfiction, ancient and modern times. She is contemplates the (Viet/Vietnamese) female experience of disappointment, suffering, love and enlightenment.
During an anxiety- and suspicion-laden trip to Germany to attend a prestigious art exhibition, a man ruminates on the day in the 1990s when as a boy he emerged for the first time from the refugee camp in Hong Kong, where escapees from Vietnam had ended up, to buy vegetables.
A couple who are saving money to open a Vietnamese restaurant overseas contemplate on the type of restaurant they would run and on the multicultural complexities related to the fate of their family and their country.
A young woman comes back to her childhood home in Saigon and meets the original owner, who after fleeing after 1975 and becoming a Vietnamese-American, now lives in Vietnam and is the new owner of the house. They share their memories of living in the house amid the upheavals of Vietnamese history.
A conversation between a young avant-garde poet, all ties with his birth place severed, and two elderly traditional lyricists. What does it mean to be a Vietnamese writer, what does poetry to patriotism? Conflicting opinions emerge.
The crowdfunding did not meet its target. Money will be returned to the donors. If you like to continue your support of this project, please turn to: thiloan.le@goethe.de. German taxpayers can receive a tax rebate in their tax income declaration for donations to Goethe-Institut e.V.
