Vietnamese-American filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha has finished editing her new film “The Undying Desert,” and it is a first in her celebrated career: the first of her films to be set in the United States. She revealed the project to Variety at the Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival, where she is being celebrated with a full retrospective.
Trinh T. Minh-ha (Credits: Variety)
“I’ve just finished editing it,” she told Variety at Ji.hlava. “I’ve made films in Africa, China, Vietnam and Japan, and people would ask: ‘When are you going to make a film about the U.S.?’ They were right, because I live there.”
The Undying Desert: Trinh’s First US-Set Film
For an artist who has spent four decades refusing to film where audiences expected her to, the choice is characteristically deliberate. Trinh, one of the most distinctive figures in experimental and essayistic documentary cinema, has built her reputation on challenging how documentaries represent other cultures, women and minorities, from her 1982 directorial debut “Reassemblage” to “Surname Viet Given Name Nam” (1989).
The Ji.hlava retrospective, titled “The Transparent Being of Trinh T. Minh-ha,” screens those landmark works as part of the festival’s 30th anniversary edition, which runs October 23 to November 1, 2026 in Jihlava, Czech Republic. The edition features more than 350 films, including 106 world premieres, plus the anniversary strand “Films That Changed the World.”
A Retrospective 44 Years in the Making
Trinh received the festival’s World Cinema Contribution Award alongside Czech documentarian Helena Treshtikova, a fitting honor for a filmmaker, writer, composer and theorist whose work has shaped postcolonial and feminist cinema. The retrospective includes “Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen,” filmed in Senegal, and “Surname Viet Given Name Nam,” which uses testimonies by Vietnamese women to interrogate who gets to tell their stories.
With “The Undying Desert” now edited, Trinh turns her camera toward the country she calls home. As ever, she will do it on her own rules.
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Source: Variety — read the full story there.
