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This talk discusses cinema in post-reform Vietnam through a combined analysis of gender, creative labor, and transnational filmmaking by looking at the five-decade career of a prolific and well-known socialist film star Nhu Quynh. As an experienced actress who has been awarded by the Vietnamese government with one of the highest artistic titles—the People’s Artist—Nhu Quynh has made an important contribution to the success of many high-profile, international film projects shot in Vietnam after the country began opening its economy in the late 1980s such as Indochine (1992), Cyclo (1995), and The Vertical Ray of Summer (2000), as well as that of highly acclaimed films of the Vietnamese New Wave like Wharf of Widows (Bến không chồng, 2001) and Pao's Story (Chuyện của Pao, 2006). By exploring the complexities of cinematic female images embodied through her characters, Nhu Quynh challenges the current reading of Vietnamese cinema that fixates on the representations of suffering, submissive, repressive women as the singular response to the heroic, triumphalist portrayals of wartime heroines. Defying the prevailing hypothesis that women would be a victim of the market economy, Nhu Quynh’s stardom illustrates the actress’s capability to take the opportunities of the open-economy policies to cultivate an impressive career amidst the crisis of the Vietnamese film industry in the post-socialist era.

Qui-Ha Hoang Nguyen is a postdoctoral associate at Yale University MacMillan Center for Southeast Asian Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California in 2020. Her research interests include film postcolonial historiography, gender, and feminist studies, transnational film/media industry, environmental humanities, and global Asian cinema. Nguyen’s current book project, Figuring Women in Vietnamese Revolutionary Cinema (1945 – 1975): Representation, Affect, and Agency, is a study of women’s lived experiences, emotions, and agency on and off-screen in wartime Vietnam.