Montreal documentary maker Ashley Duong saw her father, Anh Duong, end a lifetime of cold silence over his traumatic upbringing in war-torn Vietnam by publishing a memoir shaped as a series of letters to his daughter.

So it wasn’t long before Duong, in her chosen medium, film, adapted her father’s memoir into Ba’s Book, an inventive hybrid film that bends the edges of a documentary with drama and is screening on Sunday night at the Vancouver Film Festival. She pieces together the journey the director’s tight-lipped father, also known as Ba, took through Vietnam during that civil war and as a refugee in 1970s revolutionary Iran, before starting a new life in Canada in 1980.

During that lifetime, Ba kept painful memories hidden from his daughter and family until the 2024 publication of Dear Da-Le: A Father’s Memoir of the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution. “There’s all these moments throughout his life where he was really learning how to hide his emotions,” Duong tells The Hollywood Reporter, as her father had a need to navigate political landmines as a witness to wartime brutality in Vietnam and Iran.

But what her father left out of his memoir and Duong captured in her film was the untold torment of Ba leaving his mother, Nguyen Thị Bay, or grandmother Ba Noi, and close relatives behind in their ancestral village in Vietnam. And it’s those siblings with whom Ba reunites — and is brought at times to bruising places as they reveal their own untold family secrets — in Duong’s film that provide the emotional backbone for Ba’s Book.

“I wasn’t sure what to expect from my relatives. But they really put all their heart and soul into the film. They helped with the design of the sets, the casting of the relatives. There was a lot of love shown and that meant so much to me,” Duong explains. But her relatives gave more than off-camera tips as Ba’s Book recreates the director’s father and his life in Vietnam alongside his relatives on camera.

To get her father and his siblings to offer answers to questions no one had ever dared ask in the past until Duong’s cameras rolled, an inventive hybrid documentary-narrative model was hatched for the film. Some archival footage appears in Ba’s Book.

But mostly Duong’s relatives — and actors playing their younger selves as proxies to share wartime experiences — appear on camera and in re-enactments as cast and crew to help the director revisit and reveal secrets of the past as her father’s personal story and a family shaped by the legacy of violence and civil conflict unfolds.

“Not everybody is going to stage recreations with sets and actors and everything. But it’s just our family trying to figure out how to finally talk about things that they’d never spoken about,” the director explains. A hybrid film that moved fluidly between re-enactments and documentary, built on a set in Vietnam, the home Duong’s father and siblings grew up in, but with only three walls and not four to allow the relatives and actors, as if on a stage, to portray their younger selves.

Other inventive scenes include Duong’s father reading from his memoir in Vietnamese, as his relatives do not speak or read English, and so will not have heard his story as written down. And his relatives in turn gave notes to the actors playing their younger selves and were encouraged to interrogate Ba as his coming-of-age story was dramatized.

“I loved it when someone else asked the questions,” Duong recalls, as the veteran documentary maker has never come from behind the camera to appear in front of one. The actor who played the role of a youthful Ba, Duy Nguyen, who himself was born in Vietnam and is a Montreal-based actor today, was especially interested in knowing his character’s backstory.

“We really lucked out with Duy as he could relate to a lot of things my father went through — being the eldest son, the only one in his family who is in Canada and his guilt that comes from being abroad,” Duong explains. Ba’s Book also did not rely on one camera in the corner of a room to capture what goes by.

Duong instead had three cameras rolling at all times on set, with one focused on a documentary that captured mostly unfiltered footage, and another with a more narrative-focused lens zooming in and out and even using reverse angles as a three-person fiction crew followed a loose script she penned along with Steven Sych.

A particular focus in Ba’s Book is Dương Thị Hạnh, or the director’s Aunt Hanh, who reluctantly at first and then eventually reveals anger felt towards her older brother over the rigid patriarchy of wartime Vietnam that had her caring for Anh Duong so he could study and complete an education she was denied.

In the end, director Duong, recognizing Aunt Hanh’s residual indignation, lances that boil. “There’s a point in the film where I want to say thanks to (Aunt Hanh) because I’m thinking if she didn’t free my dad up from domestic labor, he wouldn’t have been able to study as he did. My life would have been totally different. I owe this woman so much. Somebody, and I never knew who, but she had sacrificed this way, having to stop school when she was nine,” Duong explains.

The result is Ba’s Book becoming equal parts observational and performance as Duong uses various camera angles and coverage to allow her father, his siblings and the director herself to share historical traumas, lay bare an emotionally wrenching story of family division and make peace with their past.

That’s far more inclusive healing than might have happened if Duong had only responded to her father’s memoir with her own letters. Instead, she brought a reluctant father to Vietnam to help via film to tell an emotionally wrenching story of family divisions and reconciliation.

“A lot of this film is us realizing the way we show up for each other is by being each other’s narrative devices,” the director explains. Duong recognized her father had really been writing to himself to confront an untold past.

Likewise, Duong used her cameras to create a safe space for her family to act out past memories to, at long last, talk about what each means to one another, good and bad. Duong argues, “It’s 50 years later. It’s not about division so much as how to move on. And a lot of people can relate to that kind of story, people who are in the diaspora, families who are divided by historical and political events and it’s a glimpse of their future.”

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