Trinh T Minh-ha: A Tale of Love

Re-imagining the long Vietnamese poem The Tale of Kiều (1820), seen by the Vietnamese people as a mythical biography of the 'motherland' marked by internal turbulence and foreign domination, Trinh T Minh-ha’s A Tale of Love follows a modern day Kieu, a complex and strong female character.

A love of 'love' consumes Trinh's Kieu, who is conflicted by her representation through photographic images and their social and symbolic significance through the love of those who view them. The film breaks open traditional narrative conventions in favour of what Trinh describes as a denaturalized space of acting. Working with scripts in unexpected ways, the work sets up intersections between reality, memory and dream zones.  

Born in Vietnam, Trinh T Minh-ha is a filmmaker, writer, composer and Professor of Rhetoric and of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work includes eight feature-length films honoured in numerous retrospectives around the world, several large-scale collaborative installations including L’Autre marche (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris 2006-2009), and Old Land New Waters (3rd Guangzhou Triennale, China 2008) and numerous publications including Lovecidal: Walking with The Disappeared (2016), D-Passage: The Digital Way (2013), Elsewhere, Within Here (2011) and Cinema Interval (1999).

She has been the recipient of many awards, including the Wild Dreamer Lifetime Achievement Award at the Subversive Festival, Zagreb, Croatia, 2014, the Lifetime Achievement Award from Women's Caucus for Art, 2012 and the Trailblazers Award, MIPDOC, Cannes Documentary Film, France, 2006.

A Tale of Love, dirs Trinh T Minh-ha and Jean-Paul Bourdier, 1995, 35mm, colour, sound, 108 mins

Enjoy special multibuy prices to buy tickets to multiple films and events in the Trinh T Minh-ha season:

• Tickets for 2-3 screenings: £7 (full price) / £5 (concessions) / £4 (ICA Members) per ticket
• Tickets for 4-8 screenings:  £6 (full price) / £4 (concessions) / £3 (ICA Members) per ticket

Download the programme listing for Trinh T Minh-ha's retrospective programme here [PDF]