A Tale of Love

A film by Trinh T. Minh-ha

1995 | 108 minutes | Color | 35mm/DVD | Order No. 99421

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SYNOPSIS

Portraying the Vietnamese immigrant experience through Kieu, A TALE OF LOVE follows the quest of a woman in love with ‘Love’. The film is loosely inspired by THE TALE OF KIEU, the Vietnamese national poem of love which Vietnamese people see as a mythical biography of their ‘motherland,’ marked by internal turbulence and foreign domination. A free-lance writer, Kieu also works as a model for a photographer who idealizes the headless female body and who captures Kieu sheathed by transparent veils. Voyeurism runs through the history of love narratives and voyeurism is here one of the threads that structures the ‘narrative’ of the film. Exposing the fiction of love in love stories and the process of consumption, A TALE OF LOVE marginalizes traditional narrative conventions and opens up a denaturalized space of acting where performed reality, memory and dream constantly pass into one another. Sublimely beautiful to watch, A TALE OF LOVE eloquently evokes an understanding of the allusive and powerful connections between love, sensuality, voyeurism and identity.

PRESS

“Trinh T. Minh-ha’s cinema is theoretically rigorous and intellectually demanding, certainly; but hers is also a cinema of great beauty, where the edges of difference rub against each other in stunning and challenging ways.”

Judith Mayne Ohio State University

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

  • Berlin Film Festival
  • Toronto Film Festival

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Trinh T. Minh-ha

TRINH T. MINH-HA
Born in Vietnam, Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, writer and music composer. Her works include:

Films::
WHAT ABOUT CHINA? (135 mins digital film, 2021)
FORGETTING VIETNAM (90 mins digital film, 2015)
NIGHT PASSAGE (98mins digital narrative film, 2004)
THE FOURTH DIMENSION (Japan, 87 mins digital film, 2001)
A TALE OF LOVE (108 mins 35mm narrative, 1995)
SHOOT FOR THE CONTENTS (China, 102 mins 16mm, 1991)
SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM (108 mins 16mm, 1989)
NAKED SPACES - LIVING IS ROUND (135 mins 16mm, 1985)
REASSEMBLAGE (40 mins 16mm, 1982)

Books: including • Lovecidal. Walking with The Disappeared (2016), • D-Passage. The Digital Way (2013), • Elsewhere Within Here. Immigration, Refugeeism and The Boundary Event (2010); • The Digital Film Event (2005), • Cinema Interval (1999), • Framer Framed (1992), • When the Moon Waxes Red. Representation, Gender and Cultural politics (1991), Woman, Native, Other. Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989), • En minuscules (poems, 1987); and in collaboration with Jean-Paul Bourdier, • A World in Dwelling (2011), • Habiter un monde (Paris, 2006), • Drawn from African Dwelling (1996), •African Spaces - Designs for Living in Upper Volta (1985);
Large-scale multi-media installations: • “Nothing But Ways” (in coll. with LM Kirby, 1999, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco), • “The Desert is Watching” (2003, Kyoto Art Biennale), and • “L'Autre marche” (The Other Walk, 2006-2009 at Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, both in coll. with Jean-Paul Bourdier), • “Old Land New Waters”, Okinawa Fine Arts Museum (2007; 2009); Guangzhou Art Triennial in China (2008), Chechnya Emergency Biennale (2008), Le Quartier, Quimper, France ( 2016) , Museo Revoltella, Trieste, Italy (2018), and • “In Transit: Between and Beyond” (in coll. with LM Kirby, Manifesta 13, Marseille, France 2020).

The recipient of numerous awards and grants (including the 2014 Wild Dreamer Lifetime Achievement Award from the Subversive Festival in Zagreb, Croatia; the 2012 Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award; the "Trailblazers" Award at MIPDOC, Cannes; AFI National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award, her films have been honored in over 64 retrospectives-in Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Singapore, Korea, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Argentina, Croatia, Columbia, Mexico, Finland, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Slovenia, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, the UK, the US—and were exhibited at the international contemporary art exhibition Documenta 11 (2002) in Germany. They have shown widely in the States, in Canada, Senegal, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as in Europe and Asia. Reassemblage was initially exhibited at The New York Film Festival (1983) and has since then become a classic of critical ethnographic films. Naked Spaces received the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Experimental Feature at the American Int'l. Film Festival and the Golden Athena Award for Best Feature Documentary at the Athens International Film Festival in 1986; it toured nationally and internationally with the 1987 Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Surname Viet Given Name Nam has received the Film as Art Award from the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SF Museum of Modern Art), the Blue Ribbon Award at the American Film and Video Festival, and the Merit Award from the Bombay International Film Festival. Shoot for the Contents won the Jury's Best Cinematography Award at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival and the Best Feature Documentary Award at the Athens International Film Festival, and toured internationally with the 1993 Biennale of the Whitney Museum. A Tale of Love showed internationally in over twenty-four film festivals, including Berlin and Toronto. The Fourth Dimension (Locarno, Viennale, Edinburg, London), Night Passage (UK, Austria, Spain, Japan, Korea, Shanghai) and Forgetting Vietnam (Cinéma du Réel, Paris; Copenhagen; Singapore; Taiwan; Sweden; Vancouver and Montreal, Canada etc.) continue to exhibit widely.

Trinh Minh-ha has traveled and lectured extensively on film, art, feminism, and cultural politics. She taught at the National Conservatory of Music in Dakar, Senegal (1977-80); at universities such as Cornell, San Francisco State, Smith, and Harvard, Ochanomizu (Tokyo), Ritsumeikan (Kyoto), Dongguk (Seoul); and is Professor of The Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. (4/22)

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Forgetting Vietnam

One of the myths surrounding the creation of Vietnam involves a fight between two dragons whose intertwined bodies fell into the South China Sea and formed Vietnam’s curving S-shaped coastline. Influential feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s lyrical film essay commemorating the 40th anniversary of the end of the war draws inspiration from ancient legend and from water as a force evoked in every aspect of Vietnamese culture. Minh-ha’s classic Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) used no original footage shot in the country; in Forgetting Vietnam images of contemporary life unfold as a dialogue between land and water—the elements that form the term "country." Fragments of text and song evoke the echoes and traces of a trauma of international proportions. The encounter between the ancient as related to the solid earth, and the new as related to the liquid changes in a time of rapid globalization, creates a third space of historical and cultural re-memory—what local inhabitants, immigrants and veterans remember of yesterday’s stories to comment on today’s events.
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Night Passage

Made in homage to Kenji Miyazawa’s children’s sci-fi classic MILKY WAY RAILROAD, NIGHT PASSAGE is an experimental feature from celebrated filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha and artist Jean Paul Bourdier (REASSEMBLAGE, THE FOURTH DIMENSION, A TALE OF LOVE, SHOOT FOR THE CONTENTS, SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM). This provocative digital tale tells the story of three young friends traveling for a brief moment together on the train between life and death. Their journey into and out of the land of ‘awakened dreams’ occurs on a long ride on a night train. Ingeniously framed through the train window, filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha and artist Jean Paul Bourdier create whimsical and sensual dreamscapes, which is matched by an equally beautiful and other-worldly music score. Once again, Minh-ha shifts the way she engages with the form and the spirit of the cinema—to challenge and provoke her audience.
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The Fourth Dimension

Acclaimed filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha ventures into the digital realm with her stunning feature, THE FOURTH DIMENSION, an incisive and insightful examination of Japan through its art, culture, and social rituals. As is the case with Trinh's previous films, her film is a multi-layered work addressing issues around its central theme: the experience of time, the impossibility of truly "seeing," and the impact of video on image-making. THE FOURTH DIMENSION is an elegant meditation on time, travel, and ceremony in the form of a journey. In her first foray into digital video, Minh-ha deconstructs the role of ritual in mediating between the past and the present. She explains, "Shown in their widespread functions and manifestations, including more evident loci such as festivals, religious rite and theatrical performance, 'rituals' involve not only the regularity in the structure of everyday life, but also the dynamic agents in the world of meaning." With its lush imagery, Minh-ha's Japan is viewed through mobile frames, with doors and windows sliding shut, revealing new vistas as it blocks out the old light. “Trinh T. Minh-ha’s newest essayistic work and her first videotape, cuts an intricate key for unlocking this elusive culture. Her tack finds great visual pleasure in the everyday, composing and decomposing the social landscape, while constructing a poetic grid of temporalities, symbolic meaning, and ritual. In THE FOURTH DIMENSION, Trinh’s lyrical narration guides us through ‘Japan’s likeness,’ the perfected framing of the sacramental familiar.” - Steve Seid
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Shoot for the Contents

Reflecting on Mao’s famous saying, “Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film—whose title refers in part to a Chinese guessing game—is a unique excursion into the maze of allegorical naming and storytelling in China. The film ponders questions of power and change, politics and culture, as refracted by Tiananmen Square events. It offers at the same time an inquiry into the creative process of filmmaking, intricately layering Chinese popular songs and classical music, the sayings of Mao and Confucius, women’s voices and the words of artists, philosophers and other cultural workers. Video images emulate the gestures of calligraphy and contrast with film footage of rural China and stylized interviews. Like traditional Chinese opera, Trinh’s film unfolds through “bold omissions and minute depictions” to render “the real in the illusory and the illusory in the real.” Exploring color, rhythm and the changing relationship between ear and eye, this meditative documentary realizes on screen the shifts of interpretation in contemporary Chinese culture and politics.
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Surname Viet Given Name Nam

Vietnamese-born Trinh T. Minh-ha’s profoundly personal documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women historically and in contemporary society.
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Naked Spaces

Shot with stunning elegance and clarity, NAKED SPACES explores the rhythm and ritual of life in the rural environments of six West African countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkino Faso, Togo, Benin and Senegal). The nonlinear structure of NAKED SPACES challenges the traditions of ethnographic filmmaking, while sensuous sights and sounds lead the viewer on a poetic journey to the most inaccessible parts of the African continent: the private interaction of people in their living spaces.
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Reassemblage

Women are the focus but not the object of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s influential first film, a complex visual study of the women of rural Senegal.
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What About China?

Offering a journey into the wealth of China’s traditional architecture while exploring the hinterlands of self and other in their encounter, the film addresses the process of "harmonising" rural China, due to the country's Great Uprooting. It seeks to engage the viewer further by asking: What exactly is disappearing? And how?
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