Project Spotlight: THƠ, the First Film by and about an Asexual Girl of Color

Heather Muriel Nguyen (she/they) is a queer Vietnamese-American filmmaker focused on creating stories that reflect queer and trans communities of Color grappling with intergenerational trauma and self-love. As an actor, writer, and director, Heather is a multifaceted creator who focuses on authenticity and nuanced storytelling. Heather was recognized as a 2020 Sony Rising Storytellers semifinalist for her incredible art. We’re proud to spotlight her film THƠ, which is the first film by and about an asexual girl of color. Premiering at Outfest Los Angeles 2021, it touches on the experiences of the Vietnamese-American panromantic asexual/ace lead and the romantic relationships in her life. Thơ goes through a journey of questioning and through that, the audience sees the deep emotional depth that Nguyen infuses into their art. Keep reading to learn more about Heather Muriel Nguyen and to watch Thơ.

How did you find filmmaking as a medium?
As a small child, my parents let me run around with their videotape recorder, filming whatever amused me. I began to write and act out wild spy and ninja adventures with my younger brother. We wanted to be the superheroes with energy blasts and tragic ends, as well as the secret agent children undercovering the conspiracies of adults. Our home videos gave us the space to capture these worlds. 

In fifth grade, I met my best friend -- before we found the terms for Transness and Queerness. He also adored making zany, gender-bending films that ranged from defying parents' expectations about our identities to rebelling against evil teachers who wanted to experiment on our classmates. It was a wild, beautiful time. With him as my fellow conspirator, I had the freedom to fall in love with visceral storytelling.  

I fell away during high school, swayed by my mom's insistence that the arts were unstable. But in my last year of college and the fallout of Trump's election, I abandoned pre-med and grappled with trying to find a career where I could continue creating spaces for Queer and Trans folks of Color in my expanding community to still feel safe and heard. 

I found filmmaking again -- first through acting and, when I was unsatisfied with the caliber of available roles for Asian-American femmes, I dove full force into building my own worlds and multiverses. They helped me make sense of how my asexuality fit (and didn't) into nearby Queer communities and of how my morality OCD, depression, and autism each shape the way I can feel so deeply and painfully about everything and everyone around me.

What inspires you as a filmmaker?
I'm enthralled by films with thoughtful and authentic precision, such as in Carly Usdin's Misdirection, because of how much I resonate with that style. I admire how cleanly Carly crafted each moment, from every single actor's line deliveries and Vico's comedic reversals to the gorgeous slow-motion dolly shots and the beats of silence filled with history between Camila and Jessie. As someone with OCD, I loved how they beautifully portrayed it as an everyday component of life. Carly created a world I could live in.

I aspire to Elizabeth Henstridge's directing of her episode As I Have Always Been, in Agents of Shield Season 7. Its high stakes are rooted in these beloved relationships and every performance, especially Elizabeth's as Gemma, is vividly carved out, while also feeling organic and true to the characters. She made both comedic and dramatic beats effortlessly seep into each other.

As an actor, especially when I'm also the writer and producer, I'm challenging myself to be okay with a scene not going the way I tried to make it go. It leaves me in awe but also full of hope when I watch Elizabeth both brilliantly direct and act in that episode. She is someone who rehearses abundantly and thoroughly but still manages to deliver seemingly-spontaneous performances.

I want to make my own moments where the audience is barrelling through a scifi but grounded situation with an intelligent character, who has reckless abandon and emotionally high stakes -- a character who's simultaneously in danger and dangerous. Those moments are what my brother and I created together, what my best friend and I channeled our teen angst through. They feel real and honest and, therefore, give me life when everything else feels bleak and superficial.

How long did THƠ take to create?
I made THƠ to reclaim my story and ownership over my body and mind, three months after the film's final events of sexual trauma happened to me. In Sept. 2019, I wrote and workshopped the script in my acting classes, gathered our fantastic crew who were 93% of Color and Queer, and finalized shots and gear with my incredible co-director Jake, DP Kat, AD Marielle, and producer Linda. 

In Nov. 2019, I cast the actors and held blocking rehearsals with them and Jake. We filmed over a weekend in the same month! Throughout 2020, we bounced around working with several editors whom we loved, but who didn't match our vision, before I taught myself to use Premiere to edit it in Oct. 2020. We finished working with our incredible composer Pablo and sound mixer Jax that October as well. 

Although the film began as a passion project, I led a successful Seed & Spark campaign in April 2021. We raised $10.5K (114% of our goal) to finally compensate our phenomenal production crew and cast.

What challenges did you face during the project?
Editing the film was a re-traumatizing, often exasperating experience. I like to call editing with Premiere "working with existential legos" -- misclick and you obliterate several beats of footage. We were in the midst of 2020 and didn't know how to make what we filmed click for both me and Jake. I was steadily absorbing how to edit from our collective notes to our previous editors, until we reached a point where we just didn't know if we could finish it. 

It no longer at this point was about reclaiming my story. Filming our magically-real, vivid rendition of those events had made me feel whole for the first time after the sexual trauma had dissociated my mind and body. With my story, we wanted to help others feel loved and seen, too. It was now about how we could clearly communicate how assumed consent and sexual entitlement to a person's body can dismantle their sense of reality. We didn't know if we could do that with the footage we had.

My solution was for me to edit the scenes with the frenetic pacing and non-linear storytelling that matched how my brain, particularly with morality OCD, conjured and constantly relived the events that inspired the film. I stopped editing once the traumatic scenes made me feel in my body what those events had made me feel in the moment. Anything less visceral and exact felt dishonest. 

It was excruciating to meticulously rewatch those scenes until they undid my fresh healing and reestablished my traumatized body's distrust with my mind. But I was committed to show exactly what it was like for an asexual and anxious Vietnamese-American girl like me to go through that, for the chance to make anyone who resonates with my story feel less alone, and emboldened to trust themselves.

I wanted to equip them with the film and its visceral metaphors to help them hold their own and speak against anyone who tries to "fix" them with sex or teach them to be "normal," like my past partners tried to do with me. And maybe audiences who resonate with the characters based on those partners would also realize that asexuality is a valid Queer identity and not something to be proved wrong. 

I likely won't edit something so painfully reflective of my mind ever again (HA) but I made a cut that finally clicked and blasted me and Jake out of post-production hell. It was raw and unapologetically me, and that made it feel worth it, before anyone else watched the final cut.

What role in filmmaking do you enjoy most?
I adore being a casting director, because it draws upon my constant training as an actor to carve out specific, relationship-based, genre-aligned character thoughts, and then I can pinpoint that in actors who submit for roles I'm casting. I love rooting for other people, especially those who breathe life into words, and requesting and watching self-tapes gives me the opportunity to do that. 

I love directing for a similar reason, because I enjoy communicating from an actor's perspective to another actor how to build reversals and incorporate compressed intimacy into their performances, etc. as well as tailor it all to their specific vibe and the cinematography. Every time I collaborate with a director without an acting background and translate their notes to our actors, it's joyous to witness our cast suddenly understand and perform what my co-director wanted.

Currently, casting is more enjoyable than directing, because I have much more to learn about camerawork to capture the emotional journeys that I can identify and evoke from actors and myself. 

Acting is my first love, because nothing beats viscerally conveying a relationship and high stakes through my own face and voice and body. However, I'm still learning how to wear all the hats (director, writer, producer, casting, and actor) and preserve the organic, spontaneous nature of my acting through it all. Alone, it's my favorite, but as a multihyphenate in production, I'm striving to turn off everything else to feel more free in it.

What’s the state of asexual representation right now in your experience?
There's an abysmally meager amount of it so far, particularly regarding asexual characters written, created, and/or portrayed by asexual people! There are 30 or so asexual characters in mainstream film and TV -- several of them are animated and not human; only three of them are aces of Color; and most of them are not created or played by asexual people, which becomes obvious when their character-arcs depict asexuality as a temporary obstacle to overcome in a relationship and when their creators and actors describe these characters' asexuality as a "fascinating" thought experiment or afterthought. 

This misrepresentation ingrains the heteronormative assumption that asexuality is a phase into their audiences and perpetuates lasting harm against people on the asexual spectrum. THƠ was my way of healing from a partner treating my asexuality as inconsequential to what they wanted from my body, and then coping with another partner later treating my asexuality and pain like obstacles for them to conquer. So it's personal. I think excellent media representation is only possible if it's personal for their creators. 

After THƠ, I see no point in me further pursuing asexual stories with sex at the forefront. I'm not a fan of asexual representation that roots our identities and asexual spectrum solely in sex, by an allosexual creator who doesn't know how insignificant sex can be to an aspec person and how there's such a vast spectrum of our experiences with intimacy and love being underestimated.

What defines my pursuit of future aspec representation has been audience responses to THƠ. At our in-person festival screenings, particularly at Outfest 2021 and Philadelphia Asian-American Film Fest 2021, I've been floored to meet so many folks, mostly AFAB, many Queer and some straight, who resonated with our film and my story. They didn't feel retraumatized, but instead empowered and seen. 

As I meet more folks of Color on the asexual and aromantic spectrums and those who discovered they're asexual through my film, I feel increasingly driven to make those films and shows that have the unapologetic, honest, and healing representation that we don't see and are craving.

How did you create a safe shooting environment for your cast and crew?

We established early on, in rehearsals and crew meetings, that it was crucial for us to make sure our actors felt comfortable with the blocking and safe in scenes depicting sexual trauma. I personally drew an emotional boundary of treating the characters as separate from the people they were based on and committed to not put any of my trauma on the actors themselves. We also ensured our crew were aware of and comfortable shooting the material before joining our team and that they knew the story was based on my lived experiences. We had a closed set for the scenes with nudity.

We brought on an initial group of actors whom we ended up letting go after the table read, because they joked about and laughed at the traumatic scenes and relationships. After that, I learned how to do casting myself and was more firmly outspoken about building a team that would be more empathetic and one we could trust with a story already so painful.

We had structured the blocking based on what our actors were comfortable with during rehearsals, which we held on the bed that would be our set, ahead of filming, to ensure nothing was unexpected. Our fabulous intimacy coordinator Liz ensured that all our actors could use their preferred barriers for the sex scenes, choose their level of nudity, and give and take away consent on any of the blocking at any time. During filming, our cast and I constantly checked in with each other and Liz. It was crucial for me and Jake to make sure our actors' bodily autonomy felt respected and to not perpetuate the trauma that our film depicted.

What do you hope to create in the future?

I'm writing a pilot expanding upon the nuances of THƠ that didn't fit in the film! The show dives into how the relationships in the short came to be and how these characters coexisted and attempted to survive levels of manipulation and control in their relationships with mentors and romantic partners. I'll pitch it to production companies that seek visceral magical-realism with unapologetic Queerness and Transness in communities of Color, specifically Asian-American, Black, and Latine. It'll stream on HBO Max or AppleTV+. 

It's my way of continuing to make sense of constant and increasing attacks on Trans youths, Black communities, and Asian-American femmes and elders, as well as reassess what Queerness can look like in isolation.

With this show, I'll collaborate with writers, directors, and producers with the identities and experiences of our characters, who range in ethnicities, sexualities, and neurodivergence. We'll build the worlds that we've been craving and seek solace in, and make them tangible, visceral, and pulsing with vibrant colors, performances, and cinematography. 

My team and I will feed our and our communities' desire for stories made for and by us, without compromise. That's what feels worth it to me.

Keep following Heather via Instagram or through their website!