Tuan Andrew Nguyen works across video, sculpture, and installation, drawing on long-term research, community collaboration, and oral history. He views storytelling as a speculative and reparative act that reclaims histories often obscured by official narratives.

The Boat People extends Nguyen’s ongoing inquiry into transmission and the afterlives of objects. Set at the brink of humanity’s possible extinction, the film follows a group of children wandering across flooded landscapes in search of traces from a vanished civilisation. Having inherited a world submerged and fragmented, they attempt to reconstruct histories they never directly experienced through the objects that remain. Encountering ruins, relics, and debris, the children carefully reproduce in wood the objects that resonate with them, carving fragile interpretations of a past they can only imagine.

The film asks what we owe to worlds we never inhabited and to those who will inherit ours: how the stories held in things pass between the living and the dead, and what forms of kinship survive when almost everything else has been lost.