Broken Being: Prequel contains stylized violence and is not intended for younger audiences.

When someone is denied something – whether it was “theirs” to begin with or not – how do they respond? Do they turn their energy against others or look inward? Technicians and Phở Succession offers their answers through their Vietnamese characters’ callings. In both, the Vietnamese protagonists confront an abrupt end to their sources of financial stability – the steady work of a nail salon threatened by new technology and the death of a patriarch who was an expert chef, respectively. Between those two films are Endorphins and Everything Belongs to You, which adopt more meditative, less structured approaches, as opposed to the plot-driven scenarios of the aforementioned works. Endorphins captures the wandering thoughts of a young man swimming laps as he recovers from a breakup; Everything Belongs to You, as a cinematic essay, asserts the director’s feelings of her German and Vietnamese identities and her conflicting sense of cultural belonging. 

“But Not for Me” concludes with two films of defiance. The penultimate film, Broken Being: Prequel, is an animated science-fiction piece involving a medieval Vietnamese man reclaiming his loved one from a futuristic menace. Far less violent but just as uncompromising is The Little Shopping Trolley, which sees the matriarch of a financially-strapped Vietnamese Canadian refugee family act in bad faith in order to take advantage of a grocery store’s advertised discount. Denials, whether of an antagonistic, intangible, or material manner, provoke a response. The tension of the responses seen across this set snap into place, ripe for reflection.

By Eric Nong