This Home Is Not Empty

In her deeply personal debut feature, award-winning filmmaker Carol Nguyen charts her family’s first reunion since her uncle’s mysterious death. Travelling together to Vietnam, the family embarks on a revelatory—and at times uncanny—journey through intergenerational trauma and many-layered loss. With care and probing curiosity, Nguyen guides her loved ones as they navigate unsealed medical records and a decades-long silence, ultimately leading them back to each other. A metaphysical poem for complex mourning, Still Night, Burning House shows how storytelling can transform grief into collective healing.

A mother dreams and hallucinates, trying to cope with her loss of her daughter.

Filmmaker Carol Nguyen interviews her own family to craft an emotionally complex and meticulously composed portrait of intergenerational trauma, grief, and secrets in this cathartic documentary about things left unsaid.

Holy Cowboys offers a fascinating, disconcerting look at Indian youth indoctrinated as bovine vigilantes. This observational documentary from Sundance Institute alumnus Varun Chopra goes deep into a world of bigotry and division, where a genuine love for animals and a naive sense of righteousness are weaponised.

Bringing the same insight and precision to her debut dramatic work as she did with her award-winning documentaries, Toronto’s Carol Nguyen immerses viewers in the intricate matrix that connects three generations of an immigrant family.

Prague, 2022 - Having found refuge from the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, two women and their young daughters face the waiting and hope of an imminent return to Ukraine. Shelved in this city, these women tell the story of their past and give access to their daily life, their present, in which they try to learn how to live again. This documentary tries to give a voice to those who live war differently.

Witness explores the personal, political, and cultural ramifications of going viral. Directors Yasmine Mathurin, Amar Wala, and Carol Nguyen follow people who chose to document what they saw, whether in rage, fear, or amusement, and reflect on the staggering but fleeting attention that changed their lives. This series of six short episodes tells the stories that happened after the stories we heard about.

In the first episode of Cinépistolaire, Carol Nguyen and Caroline Monnet respond to the themes raised by their pen pal (language, identity, belonging) while stylistically challenging each other. An exemplary case of artistic dialogue.

They say it only takes three generations for a culture to assimilate. What happens next?

A short stop motion animation recounting my father's journey immigrating to Canada from Vietnam.

After being estranged from his family, we observe a young man over four seasons and from far away as he navigates his solitude – all the while attempting to reconnect with his mother.