This version of "Crossing Generations" is intended only for audiences within the United States. Mike and One Summer Night contain strong language.

In this globe-trotting set intended for high school/secondary school students (but also suitable for older audiences), each of these films finds their protagonists reckoning with significant changes to their lives in respect to their Vietnamese identity. A Vietnamese exchange student encounters misperceptions and prejudice in his first days at a South Dakota private school in Mike – a departure from the glossy ideal that he imagines America to be. By contrast, Viv’s Silly Mango is a riot grrrl-infused dramedy that shows how close friends often form an inextricable part of an individual’s personal growth and self-realizations. Together, Mike and Viv’s Silly Mango both comment on peer pressure, for good and ill, and how one’s upbringing informs how they present themselves to others. 

Phở is the interlude between this set’s two halves, a narrated montage as the generations of a Vietnamese French refugee family pass by – a gentle transition to films with more parental themes. The shadowy humidity of an early summer evening in Louisiana overhangs One Summer Night’s contradictions: a traditional Vietnamese responsibility to tend to our parents’ health and a parental desire to see their children succeed. No easy answers there. So too in the concluding film, Boat People. Boat People, which uses an ant metaphor to tell its story, is the result of the “sad silence” that has often followed many a second- and third-generation Vietnamese individual’s questions about why their elders left Vietnam. Across generations and places, these films present how Vietnamese people the world over grapple with change through the lens of their past.

By Eric Nong