Ba's Book Northern Lights
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About
A father writes down his life’s story for his daughter. She answers by turning it into cinema. In Ba’s Book, Vietnamese-Canadian filmmaker Ashley Duong takes her father’s memoir to Vietnam and brings it to life alongside her family. His letters span the Vietnam War and Iranian Revolution, but the film is not only about reflections; it’s also about the impact those memories have on the people who inherit them.
Shifting between documentary and staged drama, Ba’s Book treats the past as something that lives on in the room. Scenes are performed, interrupted, questioned, and reshaped as the family decides how much of their history it’s ready to face together. Duong looks at how war and displacement can leave divisions that outlast the events themselves, and how filmmaking can become a way to move through them. A TIFF Docs world premiere and winner of the Documentary Magazine Award at Cannes Docs, Ba’s Book brings a daughter, a father, and a family back inside the story that made them.
Content Considerations: Mature themes, mentions of war, police violence
Presented by
Media Partner
Shifting between documentary and staged drama, Ba’s Book treats the past as something that lives on in the room. Scenes are performed, interrupted, questioned, and reshaped as the family decides how much of their history it’s ready to face together. Duong looks at how war and displacement can leave divisions that outlast the events themselves, and how filmmaking can become a way to move through them. A TIFF Docs world premiere and winner of the Documentary Magazine Award at Cannes Docs, Ba’s Book brings a daughter, a father, and a family back inside the story that made them.
Content Considerations: Mature themes, mentions of war, police violence
Presented by
Media Partner
