
The Feedback: Elizabeth Ai Sheds Light on a Vietnamese Subculture and Her Fractured Family Tree in ‘New Wave’

A far cry from the punk-goes-pop sensibilities of the new wave rock genre, Elizabeth Ai’s New Wave explores the disco music that gripped a generation of Vietnamese immigrants and became a considerable craze in California during the ’80s. Songs from European acts like Bad Boys Blue, Modern Talking, and C.C. Catch became the anthems for these big-haired, black-clad Vietnamese youths, who eventually began spinning these tracks at clubs (such as subject Ian “DJ BPM” Nguyen) and covering their own versions (a la Lynda Trang Đài, dubbed “the Vietnamese Madonna"). Via a mixture of talking head interviews with these Vietnamese new wave cultural ambassadors as well as her own cagey family members (alongside tasteful recreations of anecdotes from the era), Ai captures a diasporic subculture. In the process, she also unravels how this genre provided a distraction from—or complete denial of—its listeners’ difficult circumstances.
With Film Independent, IDA hosted a work-in-progress DocuClub screening of New Wave in Los Angeles in December of 2022. While the feedback Ai and her team received from the screening was generally favorable, she nevertheless decided to overhaul the doc’s narrative in order to include intimate details from her family’s relationship with music—and each other—opening old wounds in the process, with particular emphasis on the filmmaker’s estrangement from her mother. The final version of the film premiered at last year’s Tribeca Festival, and is still seeking distribution. Documentary spoke with Ai via Zoom to discuss the shift in story subject over the course of seven years of development. This interview has been edited.
DOCUMENTARY: I know that you first conceived this project in 2018, which was then halted by the pandemic. How did that hiatus help shape the film’s narrative?
ELIZABETH AI: 100% for the better. I mean, it didn’t feel better at the time. I was so excited to start filming in 2019, because 2018 was an incubation period for me, as I was pregnant. I was at my other job and I knew I was going to take this long maternity leave. Of course, for somebody like me who’s a workaholic, having a long maternity leave meant I could dive right into work[ing on this film]. After filming in 2019, we got my work sample together.
But the honest truth is that at the beginning of 2020, I was so excited to get back to work, to have a job and a stable paycheck. Then the whole world shut down, and I was like, “Oh God, will I go back to work in a few weeks?” Right around that same time, I got a notification from California Humanities that we got the grant. Shortly after that, I learned that I was furloughed. I was very depressed, but I kept thinking about the film that I had set out to make in 2018. I was like, “We’re gonna preserve a piece of history and shed light on a subculture that the world has never seen.” It was much more of a—and I say this with a lot of love—by-the-numbers music doc. If I had finished it in 2020 or even 2021, I think that would have been the film. But as the years went by, I thought more deeply about what I was doing.
My teammates, producers, editors—the ones that were closest to the projects—were like, “What are you trying to say as a filmmaker versus just saving a piece of history?” It just kind of all led me back to what I was avoiding in the process of making the film. I would tell my editors, “No, cut that out. We’re trying to make a fun, celebratory film about music. Let’s not get into trauma porn.”
D: What was the process of getting subjects like Lynda and Ian on board as well as your family members? When did you realize that these individual narratives have similar arcs?
EA: I just knew that Lynda had to be in the doc. She’s the Vietnamese Madonna. Everybody in the community knows who she is. With Ian, it was serendipity. The first night that we went out to a retro party within the Vietnamese diaspora, I showed up early to scope out the scene. He was one of the first people that showed up in the nightclub. His then-girlfriend asked me, “What are you guys doing here with a camera?” I was like, “Oh, exploring the new wave scene.” She pointed at Ian and said, “He’s one of the original DJs from back in the day!” I think he was the first person I interviewed. We did more than four dozen interviews with people—whether it was on Zoom or in-person—but he’s very vulnerable, open and the son of a revered novelist, so the storytelling just came very naturally.
In terms of the intersection, it took me four years to involve my family in the film. My daughter was born in 2018. As I was making this, she was literally growing right before my eyes and asking hard questions. I was like, “I don’t even know how to answer these things.” Like, what is a war? Then she asks, “Why was your mom born in a war?” It’s so innocent and it’s a question that I never even asked myself. You don’t see your parents as a whole person. What was their journey? How did they get here?
When I asked my aunt Myra [to be in the film], she was reluctant at first. I did one interview with her very early on, but that was it. We interlaced it throughout the narrative during the fourth year of filmmaking. I reached out to my uncle, who, with my aunt, was my caretaker. They were both super into New Wave and I really looked up to them. But he was like, “No, not on camera.” I couldn’t even get photos scanned from him. A lot of people in the New Wave world felt a lot of shame around it. Like when you look at your parents’ old photos and they say, “I can’t believe what I was thinking!” They were embarrassed by the hair, style, music and rebellion. I think that’s how my uncle and aunt felt, even though I managed to convince her.
At the end of 2022, I decided, “All right, let’s explore this thing. Why am I estranged from my mom?” I pulled the trigger to buy plane tickets to see her, not having an address, just knowing that she lived in Jackson Hole. That was after that phone call of her saying, “Just tell your daughter I’m dead.”
D: How did you get connected with IDA to host a DocuClub work-in-progress screening of New Wave back in 2022?
EA: I can’t remember if it was IDA or Film Independent that reached out, because they were collaborating at that time. I’ve never been a fellow of IDA, but I have been involved in more than half a dozen of Film Independent programs. They’ve been such a huge part of my personal and professional development during the last decade-plus. But someone reached out and said, “Hey, we have an open slot. Do you want this? Turn in this information.” That was it.
The feedback was pretty good. But I was just mentally in a different space. My daughter was about to turn four and was asking me all of these questions. If the screening had taken place a year earlier, I probably would have been like, “Let’s go, the film’s fine.” But I learned in the editing process that I just wasn’t ready to move forward with that version of the film. I’m so grateful to all of my editors, but it was really hard. I would sit and ask myself, “Is this the film I want to go out there with? No.”
D: Obviously, there is a ton of music featured in the doc. Were there any challenges with securing the rights to any of these songs?
EA: This is where my producer, Rachel Sine, was amazing. I could not have done this emotionally without her. She was my de facto therapist who walked me through a lot of these things that I was so scared to share about my family. Without her, this version of the film would not exist.
We both had to figure out how to become music supervisors because we couldn’t afford one. It was very hard because the Vietnamese community didn’t clear the rights to perform and sell the music they were covering. We’d have to clear it so that we could use their performance and also clear the rights from a lot of defunct record labels who sold [the music] to a library. [The original music] appeared on these small labels, but then somehow ended up in Sony’s Warner Music Group’s hands, so now we had to pay $5,000 for something that has 1,000 listens on Spotify. It was excruciating and extremely expensive. A big chunk of our money went into that. I’m very grateful to our funders.
It was a two-year process of learning how to be music supervisors. I don’t want to insult any music supervisors for the deep knowledge and network that they have, but we just couldn’t afford one. We had to do all of these coordinating steps, going down rabbit holes of figuring out who owns what music. Like, “Oh, there are four writers on this song? We need to reach out to all of them and ask permission.”
We did the same thing for the archival footage. It felt so ethically wrong that those images we have of refugees on boats—who never asked to be filmed—are owned by companies like Getty and charge us thousands of dollars for these images. Those refugees don’t benefit in any capacity, but ABC News sells it off to some third party managing their archives. They’re like, “Sorry, it’s $12,000 per 30 seconds.” The whole industry of selling this war footage of people in vulnerable positions who don’t see a cent of that money is disgusting.
D: Do you still have plans to work on a series connected to the new wave craze?
EA: Yeah, it’s a dramatic adaptation. I always knew I wanted to do something in this world. I don’t know if the world is ready for it based on how the industry is going—what kind of projects we’re seeing and DEI departments being completely obliterated in the pandemic and beyond. I don’t know if we’ll see this project, but I do have a pitch and I’m hoping to go out with it in 2025.
Also, I’m just putting it out there: if anybody wants to pay me or my team, we want to make short-form content for the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam-American War, which is in April. I’m sure they’ll be playing Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War (2017) and Rory Kennedy’s Last Days in Vietnam (2014). I’d love to be a Vietnamese person who gets to tell a story about my people that is shared before that anniversary.
Natalia Keogan is a critic and journalist based in NYC. Her bylines include Filmmaker magazine, A.V. Club, Reverse Shot, and Paste, amongst others.