New Wave

Best New Documentary Director Special Mention, 2024 Tribeca Film Festival
Audience Award for Documentary Feature, 2024 Austin Asian American Film Festival

There’s a moment in the opening of Elizabeth Ai’s doc NEW WAVE when you hear a drum beat at the same time a cannon is shot on the screen. In a montage of 70s-era archival footage, Vietnamese kids are lifted onto boats.They walk into tents in refugee camps. They march holding American flags. They eat pizza and listen to records. This is the generation who brought us new wave, one of the Vietnamese diaspora’s most unexpected, beloved cultural touchstones, and this is the film that tells its story.

As Ai shows us, new wave is many things. New wave is a misnomer: Italo disco and Euro disco were miscategorized as “new wave” by LA’s Chinatown record shops because it sounded like Depeche Mode, so the name stuck with the local Vietnamese teenagers who discovered and covered it. New wave is also a style: a celebration of leather, bold makeup, spiked hair teased high with (shoplifted) Aquanet, and general 80s-era excess and exuberance. When Lynda Trang Dai, crowned “the Vietnamese Madonna” – and who is interviewed in this doc – sang “Gimme Your Love Tonight” in the refugee community’s internationally circulated live-show-to-video series Paris by Night wearing a tube top, striped pants, and Material Girl-esque sleeve of silver arm bangles, she shattered the elder generation’s aesthetics of respectability and literally rocked the world.

Most of all, NEW WAVE is an exploration of Ai’s family history, multi-generational refugees that she calls “escape artists,” and the kids who took care of kids as everyone navigated the aftermath of war and resettlement. Through Ai’s young ears, driven around by her aunts and uncles in their red Supra blasting “Jump in My Car,” we hear new wave as an otherworldly and futuristic pulse, an anthem of escape, and – at a time when so much was experienced but unsaid – songs of grief and collective dreaming.

– Kim-Anh Schreiber

Preceded By

No More Sad Songs

Directed by Trace Le

A young Vietnamese American woman and her diva mother have a heart-to-heart backstage in the anxious moments before stepping onstage.