By REBECCA JACOBSON, Willamette Week
When Vu Pham was a senior at Grant High School, he got a call from the office: His father was there to see him. Pham had not seen this man in more than a decade. The last time the two had locked eyes, his dad had been in prison in Vietnam.
Vu Pham on the set of his short film Baby Ipecac. (Willamette Week)
“I remember being told my father was in the cafeteria waiting for me,” says Pham, 38. “I was taken there by one of my teachers, and we just sat there in the cafeteria, in this big, empty space, just he and I.”
Pham never did develop a relationship with his father, but that experience became one of many “autobiographical tendrils” fueling his current work as a filmmaker. From the bizarre and traumatic experiences of his life, Pham crafts films he calls “fantastic creatures.” Three of these short works—fragmented and somewhat hallucinatory bursts about memory, family and peril—will play at the Portland Film Festival this weekend.
Pham was born in Vietnam but fled to Portland with his mother when he was 6. Two years later, his mom was killed by her boyfriend. He was then raised by his uncle, who’d been in the Cambodian-Vietnamese War and was, according to Pham, “a raging, maniacal asshole who beat the shit out of me all the time.” At age 16, Pham left home—threw his belongings in a dumpster, slept at the airport and at bus depots, and showered in the Grant locker room until he was taken in by another family.
When Pham’s father came to Portland, he brought a wife and four sons. One son, Tuan, would re-enter Pham’s life in an unsettling way: as a street wanderer trying to bum cigarettes and money off him.
“At first, he was very gregarious and sentimental,” says Pham, a fastidious dresser with a tendency to drop references to Derrida, Foucault and Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. “He seemed to be fairly intact mentally. But later, every time I ran into him, he was this babbling psycho who would always be talking to me and to another personality.”
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