If Revolution Is a Sickness (2022)

Set in Warsaw, the film loosely follows the character of an orphaned Vietnamese child who grows up to be absorbed into a dance group inspired by South Korean pop music. Widely popular within Polish youth subculture, K-pop is used by the artist as a vernacular material to trace a relationship between Eastern Europe and Asia with roots in Cold War allegiances. This dichotomy is further complicated by the significant Vietnamese diaspora currently living in Poland, composed of Northerners who migrated before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Southerners who came in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Nguyen traces how these layered inner conflicts are reckoned with inside the process of finding shared symbols and naming oneself from within another’s regime.
Assembling a crew of teenaged Polish dancers who perform original choreography set to music and lyrics co-written by the artist, she looks at both the exaltation and erasure of personal traumas at play in the process of representation, identity building, and the formation of a shared nation space. The melodramatic pull of the spectacle is disrupted by the voice-over, culled from various and often contradictory writings on revolution by Ulrike Meinhof, Hannah Arendt, Mao Zedong, and others.