Recent Research

DUST & METAL (Cat Bụi & Kim Loại) is a feature-length film in production in Vietnam directed by myself and produced by Live Cinema UK, working with Hanoi-based Vietnam Film Institute and TPD: The Centre for Assistance and Development of Movie Talents. The project is funded by the British Council Digital Collaboration Fund, and offers alternative perspectives of Vietnamese cultural heritage through the synergy of crowd-sourced material, archive film, oral history interviews, and newly shot footage. At the heart of this project, are personal narratives of freedom in Vietnam that connect with the country’s ubiquitous mode of transport: the MOTORBIKE. The pandemic has led to creative collaborative co-production methods for film production between the UK, Vietnam and US. With a score composed by San Francisco-based electronic artist Xo Xinh, and sound design by Hanoi-based artist Nhung Nguyễn, the project is being devised with the unique aim of premiering as a live ‘cine-concert’.
This feature film can be viewed on BFI Player.

Liberation Radio is an interdisciplinary audio-visual installation work by myself, hanoi-based sound artist Nhung Nguyen (aka Sound Awakener), and historian and BBC broadcaster Matthew Sweet. Supported by FAMLAB (Film, Archives and Music Lab) Fund as part of the British Council’s Heritage of Future Past project in Vietnam, the work will premiere at Hanoi’s contemporary art space MANZI from 28 May — 13 June 2021 www.manziart.space.

The work centres on the remarkable untold story of a group of American military deserters who in 1968 went to the North Vietnamese mission in Stockholm with one object in mind – to join the army they had been drafted to fight. Instead, they were recruited for the propaganda war – and using magnetic tape, pop music and political rhetoric in programmes made for Liberation Radio, they aimed to persuade other American servicemen to desert the war. Their recordings were transported from Sweden to Vietnam by diplomatic bag, and broadcast from transmitters on the rooftops of Hanoi, and from revolutionary bases in the countryside. (Sometimes during aerial bombardment.)

The installation combines video material sourced from 52 public domain films and a scripted narrative that conjures the cloak-and-dagger activities of the clandestine network of anti-war activists and state intelligence operatives who managed the movement of deserters from Japan through the Soviet Union to Sweden - these are performed by, among others, the actor David Warner, star of Karel Reisz’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971).

Ships in the Sky is a social history arts project that offers a unique 360-degree portrait of a building through time — the former Hull Co-operative society store and the UK’s largest mosaic ‘Three Ships’ (by Alan Boyson) that crowns the building entrance. The building has had many lives from a department store, dance hall, music venue and nightclubs (the Skyline Ballroom, Bailey’s, and Romeo's & Juliet’s), to an indoor market on the ground floor in the 1990s. When the Hull Co-operative closed, a section of the building was later occupied by British Home Stores from 1970 until final closure in 2016. Following closure, the building has been boarded-up ahead of demolition and redevelopment. The project has so far uncovered multiple alternative histories of this iconic Hull landmark — from progressive modernist public art, the co-operative movement and post-war rebuilding, to women in the workplace, friendships forged through work, retail history, and the nightclubs that have used the building. In commemorating the life of the building and those that have poignant memories connected to it, the project also prompts questions of who chooses what heritage is retained in the built environment, and ideas of architecture and public art as ‘place-making’.