Bio
Linh Vu is an experimental documentary filmmaker based in NYC. Her films have been presented at Microscope Gallery, Filmmakers Cooperative, Mono No Aware XVI Festival, Echo Park Film Center, Millennium Film Workshop, Orphan Film Symposium, Synesthesia Brooklyn, Pari Passu Gallery and Zumzeig Cinema in Barcelona.
She has worked at several film institutions and festivals including Anthology Film Archives, MONO NO AWARE, Light Industry, Ann Arbor Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Far Out Film Fest, Rhode Island International Film Festival, Producers Guild of America, among others.
She received her BA in Cinema and Media Arts from Vanderbilt University.
Artist Statement
My works, often shot with a Bolex 16mm camera and Canon 514XL super 8, are inspired by the lyrical film theory developed by P. Adams Sitney, and Jonas Mekas’s agitated camera movement as an intermediate response to and documentation of fragmentary everyday images. I am drawn to the essence of personal filmmaking, especially the idea of in-camera editing. whose poetic and impressionistic elements are combined to evoke a floating consciousness, intertwining with the vicissitudes of thoughts, emotions, and truths. I am fascinated by how the camera reverberates with the filmmaker’s intense vision, and viewers are invited to interact with what they see by reflecting on their own ideas, experiences, and beliefs. In addition, I am interested in the hands-on manipulation of direct filmmaking by destroying and creating new materials on the emulsion with an effort to repurposing the footage I shot in the past. In exploring the materiality of film celluloid, I have been experimenting with different frame-by-frame techniques such as bleaching, hand-painting, scratching, applying newspapers and stickers, contact-printing and photograms.