"Finding Phong" (Tim Phong): A Review & Interview with Phong

For a Subversity Show Online bilingual (Vietnamese/English) interview with Phong, click here.  Thanks to Thuy-Van Nguyen for interpreting! 

Garnering the Community Spotlight Award at the 2016 Vietnamese Film Festival held in Orange, California, “Finding Phong” (Tim Phong) is an exquisitely beautiful and revealing 2015 film about a young Vietnamese man’s journey to become a young woman. 

Scene from "Finding Phong":  Mother (in background) with Phong

 Although the film lists two veteran indie filmmakers Tran Phuong Thao and Swann Dubus as co-directors, credit nonetheless also belongs to the subject of this documentary, Le Anh Phong.  Phong manages capture with small video cameras her own journey (while trapped in the body of a male), as she filmed herself talking to her mother who is far away back in their rural home in Quang Ngai province in Central Vietnam.  

Selfie scene from "Finding Phong"

Phong with Subversity Show host

Self-identifying as a girl in her childhood, the star of the film also manages to capture what must be an ethnographer’s dream footage, as sister, brother and friends talk explicitly about heterosexual sex including ejaculation and oral and penetrative sex.  In addition to her mother, in her 70s, who wonders why she is fated to have such a son (she had been happy the boy was born), the bearded father (in his eighties) is shown saying that it doesn’t matter boy or girl as long as there is support for the Revolution!

 

The film has been expertly and carefully edited out of 250 hours of footage and ends right after Phong manages to complete the physical transition at a Thai clinic.  It was totally unscripted, and could not have been, given the gems of humanity that remain in the film after its length was trimmed. 

Kudos to the producers Gerry Herman and Nicole Pham who have partnered with Phong to see this amazing film reach the festival audience worldwide.  It won France’s Nanook GrandPrix at the 34th Festival International Jean Rouch last fall, and furthermore a DVD of the film has been added to every French school library in an attempt at helping overcome discrimination against the transgendered.  

Phong at VFF

Most significantly, Phong tells me in our brief Subversity Show Online interview, Phong’s mother testified before state legislators, and Phong’s story of her gender transition no doubt was instrumental in the passage of Asia’s first law permitting transgendered to register in their chosen gender, when Vietnam’s legislature passed such legislation last November.  The law comes into effect in 2017 after 282 legislators voted in favor of it, out of 366.  Unlike Phong, who had to travel to Thailand for her operation, future Vietnamese transsexuals will be more likely to find receptive clinics within Vietnam.  Phong, who had moved to Hanoi to go to university and discovered she was not alone as a transgendered, now works for the state Puppet Theater there, painting the figurines that are used in Vietnamese cultural productions.  – Daniel C. Tsang.