This version of "Crossing Generations" is intended for all audiences viewing this screening outside the United States. Mike and One Summer Night contain strong language; Newspapers implies the aftermath of violence. Viewer discretion is advised.

In this 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, the documentary short Home is Where the Star Fruits Taste Sour finds its German Vietnamese director (also the film’s main subject) traveling to Vietnam, learning more about his grandparents, and deepening his bonds with them. Together, these opening films both comment on children growing up far from the care of their parents, and how growing cultural divides can drive wedges into the bonds of familial love.  

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 fraught situations than the first half’s. Dramatic, sudden changes to tight-knit families define both Newspapers and One Summer Night. In the possibility and reality of loss, the wounds inflicted upon these families are bound by memory and the traditional duties and responsibilities that both children and their parents accept quietly – oftentimes, without question. Across generations and place, these films present how Vietnamese people the world over grapple with change through the lens of their familial ties.

By Eric Nong