Ba’s Book’ Director Reveals Father’s Hidden Vietnam War, Revolutionary Iran Past

SINGAPORE, 5 OCTOBER 2026 —

Montreal-based documentary filmmaker Ashley Duong has transformed her father’s long-suppressed memoir into Ba’s Book, a groundbreaking hybrid film that blends re-enactments, archival footage, and raw documentary interviews to expose the hidden traumas of the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution—stories her father, Anh Duong, only began sharing in 2024 through Dear Da-Le: A Father’s Memoir of the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution.

By staging intimate confrontations between her father and siblings—some of whom had never before spoken of their shared past—Duong has crafted a work that challenges traditional documentary filmmaking, using three simultaneous cameras to capture both unfiltered emotion and staged re-enactments on a deliberately incomplete set in Vietnam.

At its core, Ba’s Book dismantles the silence that Anh Duong, known as Ba, maintained for decades about his childhood in war-torn Vietnam, his refugee years in revolutionary Iran, and his eventual resettlement in Canada in 1980. The memoir he published in 2024—written as a series of letters to his daughter—revealed only part of the story.

What Duong’s film uncovers is the deeper wound: Ba’s forced separation from his mother, Nguyen Thị Bay, and grandmother, Ba Nơi, as well as his siblings, whom he left behind in their ancestral village during the chaos of the Vietnam War.

The emotional weight of these absences becomes the film’s driving force, as Duong reunites her father with his relatives for the first time in decades, only to confront the unresolved anger, guilt, and unspoken sacrifices that define their relationships.

The film’s innovative structure was born from necessity. Since Ba’s memoir was written in Vietnamese—a language his siblings do not read or speak—Duong had to find a way to bridge the generational and linguistic divide. She did so by building a set in Vietnam with only three walls, mimicking a stage where actors, including Montreal-based Duy Nguyen (who plays a younger Ba), re-enacted pivotal moments alongside Ba’s actual siblings.

These performances were not mere dramatizations but collaborative exercises, with Ba’s relatives offering notes to the actors and even interrogating their own pasts as the scenes unfolded. “Not everybody stages recreations with sets and actors,” Duong told The Hollywood Reporter. “But this was our family trying to figure out how to finally talk about things they’d never spoken about.”

One of the most revealing dynamics in the film centers on Ba’s sister, Dương Thị Hạnh (Aunt Hạnh), whose resentment toward her older brother surfaces as she recounts how she was forced to drop out of school at age nine to care for him, denying her the education he pursued. The tension between them is palpable, yet Duong ultimately frames Aunt Hạnh’s sacrifice as the foundation of her own existence.

“There’s a point in the film where I want to say thanks to her,” Duong said. “If she hadn’t freed my dad from domestic labor, he wouldn’t have been able to study as he did. My life would have been totally different. I owe this woman so much.”

The film’s technical approach further blurs the line between fiction and reality. While some archival footage appears, the majority of the content was shot with three cameras operating simultaneously: one capturing unfiltered documentary-style interviews, another adopting a narrative lens with dynamic angles and reverse shots, and a third following a loose script co-written by Duong and producer Steven Sych.

This multi-layered approach allowed Ba, his siblings, and even Duong herself—who had never appeared on camera before—to confront their shared history without the constraints of a single, static perspective.

For Duy Nguyen, the actor who embodied a younger Ba, the role struck a personal chord. “We really lucked out with Duy,” Duong explained.

“He could relate to a lot of things my father went through—being the eldest son, the only one in his family in Canada, and that guilt of being abroad.” Nguyen’s performance, rooted in his own Vietnamese heritage, added authenticity to the re-enactments, making the film’s emotional core feel immediate rather than staged.

Beyond its artistic innovation, Ba’s Book serves as a mirror for diaspora families torn apart by conflict. Duong argues that the film’s power lies in its universality: “It’s 50 years later. It’s not about division so much as how to move on. And a lot of people can relate to that kind of story—people in the diaspora, families divided by historical and political events. It’s a glimpse of their future.”

The project’s significance extends beyond personal healing. By centering the voices of Vietnamese refugees—many of whom resettled in Canada, the U.S., and Australia after the Vietnam War—Ba’s Book fills a gap in mainstream narratives about Southeast Asian displacement. While the Iranian Revolution is often discussed in global politics, its impact on Vietnamese refugees, particularly those who fled to Iran before migrating further, remains largely untold.

Duong’s film forces audiences to confront these overlapping histories, revealing how political upheaval in one country can reshape lives across continents.

The Vancouver Film Festival premiere marks the first public screening of Ba’s Book, but its potential reach is far greater. With diaspora communities in Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia grappling with their own legacies of war and migration, the film could spark conversations about intergenerational trauma, cultural identity, and the stories families choose—or are forced—to keep silent. For Duong, the process was as much about creation as it was about catharsis.

“A lot of this film is us realizing the way we show up for each other is by being each other’s narrative devices,” she said. “My father was writing to himself. I was giving my family a way to speak.”

As Ba’s Book takes its first steps toward wider distribution, its most enduring question lingers: What happens when a family, after decades of silence, finally decides to speak? For Anh Duong and his siblings, the answer may lie not in closure, but in the fragile, hard-won act of telling their story together.