Common Exceptions: Film-Screening Hao Are You

Hao Are You
D.: Dieu Hao Do, 2023, Germany, 93', German, Cantonese, Vietnamese with English subtitles

After the conquest of Saigon on April 30, 1975 by North Vietnamese troops, over 1.5 million people fled from the new communist rulers. Many of those who fled, including Dieu Hao Do's family, belonged to the Chinese minority in Vietnam. In Hao Are You, the director explores the fragmentation of his family, which was scattered across three continents as a result of the US-led war in Vietnam. Almost fifty years after their escape, contact between the family members has almost completely broken off. The film examines how the traumas of persecution and violence have taken root in the bodies and souls of the survivors and their children.

Followed by Q&A with Dieu Hao Do
With Dieu Hao Do, Can Sungu

About Common Exceptions:

The film series Common Exceptions brings together current cinematic positions from German-speaking countries that understand migration as a natural part of social reality. For a long time, migrant experiences in German cinema were only told from the outside - characterized by clichés, didactic perspectives and reductive attributions. It was not until the 1990s that filmmakers whose parents came to Germany as migrants began to tell their own stories and thus open up new perspectives. However, this opening remained fragile and development was slow. It took a long time for a new generation of filmmakers to give new impetus to pluralistic narratives in German film.

Common Exceptions presents works by this young generation that address precisely this issue. Their films refuse to justify their own existence or to be forced to explain themselves. Migration appears here as a matter of course, not as a dramaturgical state of emergency. With composure and humor, at once complex and precise, they formulate their own positions beyond external attributions. Whether autofictional, documentary or essayistic: the films break with established patterns, combine intimacy with political acuity and develop independent cinematic forms. They are plural, queer, intersectional and deliberately unpredictable, uncompromising, provocative and empowering. Their particular strength lies in the productive contradiction of having to be neither ordinary nor extraordinary. In this sense, they point to a promising future for German film.

Common Exceptions combines film screenings with talks and discursive formats. In cooperation with Berlin film initiatives and networks that are committed to long-term engagement, a space for exchange, networking and sustainable collaboration is created.