Screening of “We Were the Scenery” Winner of the Short Film Jury Award for Non-Fiction at Sundance Film Festival
March 5, 2025 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Library, 3rd Floor Alumni Reading Room 200 Willoughby Ave., Brooklyn NY 11205
With Director Christopher Radcliff and Writer/Producer
Cathy Linh Che, moderated by Kyle Lucia Wu
Based upon the poems of Cathy Linh Che, “We Were the Scenery” is a documentary short that tells the story of her parents, Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che, who fled from Vietnam by boat in 1975. While staying in a refugee camp in the Philippines, they were hired to play extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now.
Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books) and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). She is working on a creative nonfiction manuscript on her parents’ experiences as refugees who played extras on Apocalypse Now. Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival.
Christopher Radcliff is a New York–based Chinese American filmmaker whose first feature film The Strange Ones was released theatrically in 2018. It was named by John Waters as one of the top ten films of the year in Artforum magazine. His short films, including The Strange Ones, Jonathan’s Chest, and Lost Episode, have screened worldwide including at the Sundance, SXSW, Rotterdam, and Clermont-Ferrand film festivals, and online via the Criterion Collection, Short of the Week, Vimeo Staff Picks, and Le Cinéma Club. He received his MFA from Columbia University’s Graduate Film Program and currently teaches in the undergraduate Film/Video Department at Pratt Institute.