Xuan Trang Nguyen Thi is a filmmaker and a producer from Vietnam. She has nearly 20 years of experience in international cinema. Known for her commitment to independent storytelling and Southeast Asian collaborations, she has produced award-winning films including the 2024 Cannes contender Viet and Nam and the 2025 Locarno Golden Leopard winner Hair, Paper, Water…. In 2022, she made her directorial debut with the short film After Taste.

Trang arrived at Hvitsten Art Haven in April 2026. During her residency, she has been developing her first feature-length documentary, Land of Evanescence, a deeply personal exploration of identity, memory, and the experience of growing up within a changing society and a demanding national education system. The project was presented at Cannes Docs – Work in Progress in 2026 and has also been screened in Oslo and Hvitsten, where Norwegian film professionals were invited to engage with the work and contribute feedback to its final development.

Background

Trang’s career spans nearly two decades of dedication to the moving image. After graduating from university in 2007, she began working across television, advertising, promotional content, and short films. Her trajectory shifted towards independent cinema in 2014, when she participated in the Kyoto Filmmaker Lab at the Kyoto Museum in Japan. Since then, she has focused on producing independent shorts, documentaries, and feature films, eventually founding her own production company, Lagi Limited.

Her practice has developed through an international filmmaking community that she has actively cultivated through festivals, laboratories, workshops, and industry platforms. She is an alumna of the Bucheon Fantastic Film School in South Korea and has participated in numerous international co-productions. In 2021, she attended the Open Doors Lab at the Locarno Film Festival, where she received the first prize of the FAI Producer Grant.

At the centre of Trang’s artistic practice is a persistent investigation of identity, homeland, humanity, and history.

– I am deeply compelled by the interplay between the past and the present, constantly revisiting and turning these themes over from different angles through the diverse and evolving language of cinema. To express these complexities, I explore the integration of varied artistic forms – such as blending cinema, theater, and traditional performance arts like water puppetry – while frequently utilizing archival film sequences and non-traditional narrative structures within documentary frameworks, Trang explains.

Beginning with the “After”

Although Trang’s foundation is rooted in production, her artistic path underwent a significant transformation when she stepped into directing. Her short film After Taste marked this transition, exploring memory, violence, and sensory storytelling through an unsettling mixture of black humour and cinematic self-reflection. The film has celebrated its World Premiere at the 2022 Fantasia Film Festival before screening at the Viet Film Fest and the Bangkok ASEAN Film Festival.

Tara Abdullah (b. 1996) is a Kurdish multidisciplinary artist from Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Her practice spans painting, sculpture, performance, sound, and installation, often taking the form of site-specific and large-scale works.

Through her art, Tara explores the most vulnerable, suppressed, violated, and silenced aspects of her home region – women, nature, and artistic freedom. In searching for her own identity and voice – both denied and repressed until her encounter with art – she raises universal questions about power, belonging, and the relationship between the individual and society.

The First Supper – Art as the way out

Growing up in a conservative patriarchal environment profoundly shaped Tara’s artistic voice, as well as the motivations and recurring motifs in her work.

“Stop making the paper dirty!” her teachers repeatedly shouted whenever Tara was drawing at school.

“Don’t make the street dirty!” her parents would say when she drew on the ground as a child.

“You are dirty like a whore now,” Tara´s mother told her when she got her first period.

For Tara, the only way out of this darkness was through art. It was a painful path, she explained, but the only one that offered the possibility of liberation.

In her family, art was considered sinful and harmful to the mind. The only artistic input Tara was allowed was Disney cartoons on television. They inspired her by presenting an alternative world, and she became fascinated by their heroes and princesses. Together with other thoughts she used to write down her dreams and fantasies in a diary.

One day, when Tara was twelve, her father found the diary. He gathered the entire family in a room and read it aloud. As punishment, he beat Tara and shaved her head.

– My mother was holding my head, and my sisters were holding my legs, Tara recalls.

As a result of the assault, Tara was hospitalized. Her father told hospital staff that she had been attacked by a cat. After this traumatic experience, Tara noticed that much of her hair had turned white. Her sisters mocked her for it.

– In my family, I became the black sheep, a bad omen, blamed for all misfortunes, Tara explains.

Tara felt betrayed by her notebook and by writing itself, which had exposed her innermost thoughts. As a result, she began writing in mirror script so that no one could understand her words. The origins of her distinctive visual language in painting may lie in this experience as well.

Alongside Disney cartoons, religious stories were one of the few narratives available to Tara during her childhood. She was particularly drawn to stories about Jesus, a figure who also holds an important place in Islam. At the age of thirteen, however, Tara lost her faith in God after being harassed by a mullah. Yet her fascination with the figure of Jesus remained. Identifying with him, she began reimagining religious narratives through her own experiences.

When Tara first discovered art books, she hid them secretly under her bed. They were soon found and destroyed by her father. Despite these restrictions, she managed to deceive her parents and gain admission to an art college. Because her religious father considered drawing human faces a sin, he only allowed her to attend on the condition that she wear a niqab and remain fully covered. During her studies, this made her the target of bullying from both teachers and fellow students.

The first time Tara traveled abroad and visited museums, meeting in person the artworks she had previously only seen in books, the experience had a strong impact on her. Years later, she reflected on this moment in her painting The First Supper. Interweaving personal memory, imagination, emotion, and religious symbolism, the work transforms the biblical narrative into a metaphor for her first encounter with art – a moment of nourishment, revelation, and awakening.

– First is a start, a beginning, and something so huge that it never ends, Tara states.

In her next work, Peri expanded the scope of this topic, creating an installation titled “Femicide”.

The installation comprises 762 female figures. It is based on a study conducted in Kyrgyzstan that documented 762 criminal cases categorised under the article “Murder” involving the killing of women. Notably, most of these murders were perpetrated by men, with 75% of cases involving individuals who knew the victims, such as intimate partners, relatives, or friends. This alarming and silent data quantifies the magnitude of the tragedy, and the profound sense of vulnerability experienced by women, prompting Peri to create this work in a manner that aims to evoke an understanding of the scale of horror within her society.

Telling Stories of Home From Afar

The stories in Eddie’s films are always set in Myanmar. However, since filming there is no longer possible, they are brought to life in Thailand. This raises a painful question: How does one create work about home while being forced to live away from it?

Eddie grew up in a community-oriented society, and being in a collective environment remains deeply important to them. Eddie would make a deliberate effort to involve Burmese people in their film crews, as many Burmese artists and filmmakers were also exiled to Thailand.

— When I am making a film, I am fully aware that it is not Myanmar, even though the story is set there. For example, in Where the River Ends, we filmed in a forest in Thailand. Because it was in a forest, it made us think: “This could be Myanmar, if we believed it.” That brought a sense of comfort. And that feeling only really came alive because we had Burmese people on the crew. I could hear the Burmese language around me all the time, and for a moment, it felt like home, Eddie recalls.

Where Art Could Begin Again

Saba and another multidisciplinary Iranian artist, Pouya Pour-Amin, participated in Safemuse’s Safe Haven artistic residency program in Hvitsten in the spring of 2024 together, organised in collaboration with local partner Hvitsten Salong. Later, they spent the second part of their residency in Oslo, in collaboration with Nordic Black Theatre.

In Tehran, where she lived in an apartment surrounded by some hostile neighbours who supported the regime, Saba was under constant threat and anxiety, and was close to losing the strength to be an artist. But after moving to Hvitsten, she found herself inspired by the landscape and nature, and since then, she has spent nearly every drawing and painting.

The struggle for artistic freedom

Artists in Iran who refuse to stay silent in the face of the country’s authorities and current sociopolitical situation pay a high price for their expression. Over the last years, the Iranian government has taken on increasingly harsh measures to suppress artistic freedom of expression and exert control over artists through threats, censorship and persecution. 

Pouya laments the ongoing situation in his homecountry whereby artists, writers and journalists are frequently subjected to superveillance, interrogations, detention, imprisonment, torture, and even the death penalty to punish those who dare to question or criticise the system. Pouya has many friends and colleagues who have received death threats, been forced to flee the country and live in exile. He, too, has felt the heavy burden of being an artist without freedom of expression.

— While living in Iran, I worked a lot in fear. I had to find secret ways, like put my phone in the microwave, to avoid being tapped and I lived under the constant fear of getting in trouble with the authorities. Sometimes I chose not to put my name on my work to avoid getting in trouble. The thought that someone could call the door bell to detain me, plant evidence and present untrue allegations was constantly in the back of my mind, he says.