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Directors Statement My short film I loved You First is about how people remember, process and pass on personal and collective traumas across generations. In what forms do past experiences appear in the present and how do they influence our actions and our relationships with each other? How do we deal with the fact that certain aspects of our identity are depend- ing on memories of other people? Thi, the eleven-year-old protagonist, also has to face such questions. In search of her own identity, driven by the desire for autonomy, Thi goes through a deeply contradictory process of emanzipation: I loved You First accompanies Thi as she attempts to confront a transgenerational trauma that has its roots before her birth. Her own family members, however, are not in a position to provide her with necessary support – as victims they might not even be able to do so. Trauma knows no happy end. I loved You First is inspired by my own biography: In the winter of 1991, my parents fled from former Czechoslovakia across the Bavarian Forest into Germany. One reason for their flight was certainly the catastrophic conditions of their life as Vietnamese contract workers in the socialist province. But their real motivation was I, the unborn child in my mother’s womb. Having a child would have been a breach of her contract, resulting in a deportation back to her war-torn homeland Vietnam. This left her no option but to try to pass the border to Germany, where I was born only weeks later.
Country: Germany
T-Port Partner: Filmfestival Max Ophüls Preis
Hai Anh Trieu is a vietnamese german filmmaker and performance artist living in Berlin. As a child of former vietnamese contract workers in Czechoslovakia and later refugees in reunited Germany, she centers her work around diasporic experiences, displacement and transgenerational dynamics and structures of families. She is particularly interested in reflecting on the conditions of production of her own work from a critical and decolonial perspective and integrating them into the creative process.
The girl Thi gets lost in the forest. Memories of her mother’s flight – while...
