Ba's Book turns father's wartime memoir into family-made hybrid film
Ashley Duong has put her father's life story on screen, with her own family stepping in to act it out.
The Montreal-based documentary maker directed Ba's Book, a feature-length hybrid film adapted from the memoir by her father, Anh Duong, known as Ba, according to The Hollywood Reporter. His book, Dear Da-Le: A Father's Memoir of the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution, was published in 2024 as a series of letters to his daughter. A memoir in letters is exactly what it sounds like, with each section addressed to her directly rather than to a general reader.
The story covers three chapters of upheaval. It follows Anh Duong through wartime Vietnam, then as a refugee in Iran during the revolution of the 1970s, before he started a new life in Canada in 1980.
Duong tells it by mixing methods. Ba's Book blends documentary with drama through re-enactments made with sets and actors, alongside observational filming and some archival footage. A re-enactment means actors replay events from the past, often on rebuilt sets, so viewers can see what no camera was there to record. Archival footage means older film and video drawn from the record, while vérité is an observational style that simply follows people as they are.
Family sits at the centre of the shoot. In Vietnam, Duong stages the recreation of her father's memoir alongside relatives and returns with them to her ancestral village, according to her official website. Listings for the film at TIFF describe the same approach, with Duong and her family recreating episodes from the memoir on location. In practice, that meant casting relatives in Vietnam to perform moments from her father's past, as reported by She Does The City.
What makes this stand out is how close the retelling stays to home. The cast is not assembled from strangers. It is kin, working where family history happened.
The festival path began in Toronto. Ba's Book was set for a premiere there, and The Hollywood Reporter released an exclusive clip ahead of that first screening. The film then screened at the Vancouver Film Festival. For a small independent feature, an early festival screening can bring press attention and open the door to further invitations.
