UPDATE: This event has been cancelled.

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Please join WEAI for a film screening of “Song Lang” and talk with Leon Le, Filmmaker and Director of Song Lang. The panel will also feature Ying Qian, Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University, and Takuya Tsunoda, Assistant Professor of Japanese Film and Media, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University. The panel will be moderated by John Phan, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University.

LGBTQ representation in Vietnamese film—itself only a recently burgeoning artistform and industry—has been virtually nonexistent. And yet, the film industry in Vietnam has experienced a meteoric development over the past fifteen years or so—overlapping almost precisely, with a rapid and dramatic transformation in social attitudes towards sexuality, and especially same-sex relationships. While LGBTQ relationships and identities have always been a part of Vietnamese culture over long centuries of development, the past fifteen years have witnessed a turn towards explicit embrace, as well as a broadening concept of sexuality and relationship, beyond simple and strict notions of homo-versus heterosexuality. This broadening has included the representation of deeply emotive same-sex relationships that have less to do with sexual liberation than they have to do with the revival and/or reconsideration of a diversity of emotional relationships that occur between members of the same sex—including the erotic and romantic.

Writer/Director Leon Le emigrated to the US at the age of 13, and after making a name for himself as an actor in the New York’s musical theater scene, has gone on to become an award-winning director. His two previous films, Dawn (2013) and My Mother (2014) both earned him multiple awards, including Best Short Film for Dawn (VIFFI), Best Director for Dawn (YXINEFF), Best Director and Best Actor for My Mother, and Best LGBT Short Film (YXINEFF) for both Dawn and My Mother. Mr. Le has recently completed his first feature-length film titled Song Lang, which was filmed entirely in Vietnam and focuses on the relationship between a local gangster and an actor in a Cai Luong ‘reform opera’ troupe under the control of the gang. The film has been praised not only for its rich visual vocabulary, sense of tone and atmosphere, homage to the artform of Cai Luong opera, and uniquely nostalgic look at 1980s Saigon, but also for its sensitive and moving expression of a relationship between two men that defies social categorization. The film was also screened at a festival held at Film at Lincoln Center this past summer, to critical acclaim.

This is a Weatherhead East Asian Institute Arts and Culture event.

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