Still Night, Burning House

The Nguyen family. NFB 2026

(NFB, 2026, dir. Carol Nguyen, 76 min) Seen at VIFF 2026.

A quiet, deeply moving documentary about a Vietnamese-Canadian family confronting a loss they never fully understood. Director Carol Nguyen brings her family back to Vietnam to talk about her uncle Thach, who died years ago from a mental illness nobody around him recognized at the time. When the family first arrived in Canada as refugees, his early behaviour was written off by his brothers as rebellion. By the time he had a wife and children, the illness had taken hold. His brothers still blame themselves, his wife has lingering questions, and his kids were too young to understand what happened to their father.

What I admire is that the film doesn't dwell on the grief. Instead it offers a glimpse of a family that fled war and spent years protecting each other, only to find that one of their own was fighting a battle they couldn't run from. It's heartbreaking, but the film is patient, beautifully shot, and carefully directed, and over its runtime the family gets closer to making peace with it.

If you've lived through something similar, it's a rare chance to see what it looks like to face that kind of loss years later. Highly recommended.

Nguyen's feature debut is a companion piece to her 2019 short, No Crying at the Dinner Table.