Year Of The Cat: Tony Nguyen’s Intimate Excavation of War, Memory, and Healing

June 17, 2025

Written by Eseel Borlasa, After Bruce

In Year Of The Cat, filmmaker Tony Nguyen turns the camera inward -on a search that spans decades, continents, and memory itself. What begins as a personal quest to uncover the fate of a father lost in the chaos of the Fall of Saigon becomes a quietly devastating, deeply human meditation on war, family, and identity.

The documentary had its world premiere at the 2025 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, arriving at a poignant historical threshold: 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War. For many Vietnamese refugees and their descendants, this half-century mark is more than just a date to remember -it is a complicated intersection of grief, pride, and long-held silence. Year Of The Cat emerges from that space, asking: What do we carry, knowingly or not, from a war that shaped our very existence? And what stories have been buried in the name of survival?

This is not Nguyen’s first time grappling with these questions on screen. His 2015 short film, Giap’s Last Day at the Ironing Board Factory, documented his mother’s final shift after decades of labor in an Indiana factory. That piece -also screened at LAAPFF -captured the quiet toll of refugee life in America and marked the beginning of Nguyen’s journey to unpack inherited trauma and familial silence. Year Of The Cat pushes that exploration further, deeper, and with striking emotional clarity.

“The film was a five-year kind of journey, getting from start to finish -and it being highly personal… I’m sharing my baby with the world,” Nguyen has said. The premiere was met with quiet intensity and deep emotional responses. “Even with people who read as, like, cisgender men coming up to me and saying that they got emotional and cried… I’m still taking that in. Maybe it’s because I cry a lot in the movie myself,” he admitted. “I’m just trying to take in the positivity.”

The film is crafted in the style of an investigative home movie, following Nguyen’s journey from the American Midwest to the bustling alleys of modern-day Saigon. Armed with only a birth certificate, a handful of family photographs, and long-suppressed questions, he attempts to reconstruct a truth fractured by war and time. The title references the Vietnamese zodiac -1975, the year Saigon fell, was the Year of the Cat. So was 2023, when . That cyclical return frames the structure of the film: past and present folding into each other, offering space not for resolution, but for reckoning.

“Naively, when I started the search for my father, I thought it would be a straight line. Ask my mom, get an answer, go hug him,” Nguyen recalled. “But it was unpredictable. One lead led to another, and suddenly I was meeting family I never knew. There were moments of disbelief. Micro-transformations. And just realizing -I have a lot of family who love me and are rooting for me.”

That process of discovery was deeply intertwined with emotional growth. “There are still moments in the film where I get emotional watching,” he shared. “I’m learning to be gentle and accepting of myself -that it’s okay for me to cry. Growing up, I wasn’t taught how to express emotions. Only now, in my late 40s, am I starting to feel comfortable in my own skin.”

While vulnerability has long been present in Nguyen’s work, Year Of The Cat marks a shift in what he’s willing to face and share. In Giap’s Last Day, he voiced hesitation in confronting his mother about his father’s absence. “That was my truth then,” he explained. “But five years ago, after my mother had a mini-stroke and my kids started asking about their grandfather, I realized I needed to try. I think there’s even a moment in this film where I say, ‘I feel like I’m finally brave enough to do this.’”

Year Of The Cat is not just a personal reckoning -it’s an intergenerational offering. Nguyen’s children are woven into the film both in front of and behind the camera. “The film starts with a birthday my daughter filmed on her phone, and it ends with them operating the camera at another family gathering,” he said. “That felt full circle. My son, who just turned 18, told me, ‘I’m proud of you, Pops.’ That’s the stamp of approval.”

The film closes with a simple message: For the next generation. That line, Nguyen said, is intentional. “My mother came to this country pregnant with me during the Fall of Saigon. I was born into her grief -and into the absence of my father. Now I feel like I’ve reached a level of closure. My kids know more about their past. They’re not carrying my baggage or my mother’s. That’s the real gift.”

Filmmaking, for Nguyen, is not simply a profession -it is a tool for breaking silence and confronting pain. “There was something in me trying to address the wounds I was carrying. To break cycles. And for me, filmmaking became the way to do that.”

He hopes the film will speak to others -especially those at the beginning of their storytelling journeys. “Go for it,” he said. “Whether you’re young or old, if there’s even a spark of passion in you to tell stories, pursue it. You don’t need to know everything. Ask for help. There’s a whole community out there willing to support you. I still feel like a student of YouTube University -but I keep going. And you can too.”