Skip to main content
Africa-Asia 3 ConFest Main banner
UCAD
CASAP
IIAS
AUF
Ker Thiossane
CAAS
CNRS

Documentary/Film

5. Knowledge-making: Institutions, Objects, Cultural Ownership

Experimental Films I

The Postcolonial Archive: Night Sky with Exit Wounds

Saturday, June 14, 2025
09:00 - 09:45 GMT
Location: Auditorium Khaly Amar Fall, UCAD-Dakar

    Director(s)

  • TN

    Thuy-Trang T. Nguyen

    University of Wisconsin - Madison, United States

    • Producer(s)

  • TN

    Thuy-Trang T. Nguyen

    University of Wisconsin - Madison, United States

Screening followed by Q&A with the Filmmaker

Film synopsis: The Postcolonial Archive: Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a film essay about closets, the archive, and ceremonies. Through a close reading of two experimental documentary films (Loin du Vietnam, 1967 and Mysterious Object at Noon, 2000), public archival footages, and footages filmed by the author on an archival research trip to Vietnam, the film essay juxtaposes two kinds of seemingly distinct spaces: the small and enclosed closets, body bags, and personal bomb shelters versus the open, public, and staged spaces of ceremonies, plays, and performances. In the film’s estimation, the postcolonial archive—a site of knowledge production—exists as an in-between, or in the words of the Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong, “a night sky with exit wounds”.