Канадская режиссерка Ашли Дуонг снимает документальный фильм о детстве отца в Вьетнаме

Plenty of documentarians turn the camera toward their own families – even if the temptation to both dig into your past and come out the other end with a hopefully captivating piece of art is natural and fraught. (See Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell.) But then there is Canadian director Ashley Duong, who took the concept of family portraiture to new, meta-contextual levels with her doc Ba’s Book. Making its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival Sept. 15, the film acts as a semi-sequel to a memoir that her father, Anh (best known as Ba), published in 2024. By using that text as the starting point, Duong retraces her father’s childhood in Vietnam during the war while at the same time recreating his youth by filming staged scenes with professional actors. The action also all occurs under Ba’s watchful eye, with Ashley having convinced her father to return with her to his home country decades after he put down roots in Calgary. Ahead of the film’s TIFF premiere, The Globe and Mail sat down with Duong to discuss her hybrid journey into her father’s past. TIFF 2026: The 15 buzziest movies you can’t miss at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival Did you grow up in a particularly talkative family? One in which you thought, oh, I can’t wait to tell a story about these people. Definitely not. My family’s very clear about what you keep inside the house. They are quiet, reserved. My dad was also an engineer, and I didn’t think he would ever write a book. He’s just not that kind of person. When he started the process, he was excited about something, trying to explain it, and I said, “Oh, Dad, there’s a word for that: It’s called a metaphor.” He was like, “Oh, cool.” That’s how much of a surprise this all was. But when he opened that door with the book, I thought, clearly, he wants to share this story. Writing a book is one thing, though, putting yourself on-screen – while there’s an actor playing a version of yourself, staring right at you – is quite another. I was nervous about it. I didn’t know if we could work together. I didn’t know if the plans I had would retraumatize him. I was very hesitant to do this project, but then he said, “Why didn’t you just ask me earlier?” There were levels of acceptance from both his side and mine. But he did take a while to agree to come with me back to Vietnam. How much of a risk is that for you as a filmmaker, though? If he doesn’t agree to go, then the movie loses a crucial layer. Maybe the entire reason for existing. It would have been a totally different film. But I didn’t want to pressure him. He’s a lovely father, though, and will do anything for me. So he came, and worked on this for about six months in Vietnam. It was very generous of him, but also of my mom, who let him go for so long. They had never travelled apart, so she had to say, okay you can take him for a month and a half. How baked-in was the concept of making a film within a film to the original approach of this project? First, I went to Vietnam by myself and I wasn’t sure what I was doing at that point. This was before he had written his memoir. I interviewed my aunts and uncles there, and my grandmother. Nobody wanted to talk about the war. Then I received my dad’s book, and I did a little test and I cast some cousins of mine there as younger versions of my dad and my aunt, and we did little scenes, and then my grandmother came running out to say, “No no no, your dad didn’t wear shoes like that back then. This scene isn’t right!” And then she opened up about what happened during my dad’s childhood and what life was like back then. Making a documentary is no easy task at any point in time, let alone a Canadian one given the current economic clawbacks we’ve seen in the sector. How crucial was it getting the Oscar-nominated Canadian producer Ina Fichman involved in the project? She came in pretty early. I was just chatting with her at a Hot Doc event, and she asked me what I was working on next and I told her about the project and she said, “I want to produce this,” immediately. It was just that easy. I told her I’d be going to Vietnam soon and would be in touch after doing some research. Afterward, we pitched it at the Cannes Doc forum, and won a prize, so that was exciting. It was incredibly helpful to have her, because she believes in it strongly and knows the industry landscape really well. Has your father seen the finished version of the film? He’s seen a rough cut. TIFF will be when he sees the final-final film. But he was there at every stage, and my mom has seen some of it and was very moved. Her story is a bit different, she was the one who travelled by boat and had a crazy, intense experience. Working with family is always a bit challenging. Just today, my mother was like, ‘You look like you’re wearing pyjamas to your interviews!" But I’ll just have to see how it goes. I’ve never done something on this scale before. This interview has been condensed and edited. Ba’s Book makes its world premiere at TIFF Sept. 15 (tiff.net).