Filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha Finishes First U.S.-Set Movie in the Great Basin Desert

Vietnamese-American filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha has finished editing her upcoming film, "The Undying Desert," marking her first movie set in the United States. She shared the update at the Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival, where she is celebrating a retrospective of her work.

The Desert Project

She spent nearly two decades shooting the project in the Great Basin Desert. She noted that colonizing forces often label deserts as arid, but she finds the landscape very lively and examines how people relate to it. The film focuses on the way of life of indigenous people, particularly Native Americans, and explores why people visit deserts to escape conformity and connect with their true selves. While some people treat the terrain merely as a sports venue, Native Americans view the desert as layers of life where ancestors remain present and life and death go together.

Upcoming Work

Trinh has already started working on another desert-set film, which she is co-directing with her longtime collaborator Jean-Paul Bourdieu. This new project looks at groups of people who isolate themselves in the Great Basin Desert to run a research center for Mars and plan to colonize another planet. Her past film works include "Forgetting Vietnam," "Surname Viet Given Name Nam," "Reassemblage," and "What About China?"

Artistic Approach

Her films avoid individual stories, functioning instead like poetry where the "I" is collective. She views cinema as an experience for the whole body, noting that senses overlap in East Asia just as a painter can also be a musician and a poet. She advises emerging filmmakers to set their own rules rather than worry about traditional labels of fiction versus documentary. Despite having more creative leeway today, she believes documentary makers must act with greater responsibility because they create their own rules.

Context

Trinh T. Minh-ha is widely known as a writer, feminist, and post-colonial theorist who has previously directed films in Africa, China, Vietnam, and Japan. Her documentary work often challenges conventional storytelling formats and explores deep cultural and environmental themes.