Behind the Scenes of We Are The Scenery: An Interview with Cathy Linh Che
The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) recently celebrated its 45th anniversary with its 43rd CAAMFest on May 8-11, 2025. Throughout the city at multiple theater venues, multiple Asian American feature films and short films were on display. I had the pleasure of stopping by Japantown’s AMC Kabuki 8 to watch the short film, We Were the Scenery, produced and written by Cathy Linh Che. After the film festival came to a close, I sat down with Cathy over video call to discuss her experience producing a short film with her parents as the stars, her creative process for poetry and documentary writing, and her hopes and guidance for readers.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FELIX: In your short film, We Are the Scenery, your parents delve into their past as they reflect on their experience as being uncredited extras on the movie set for Apocalypse Now. Were there any challenges or surprises you faced in initiating this conversation with your parents?
CATHY: My parents are very open about their lives, so getting them to talk about Apocalypse Now is not challenging at all. They are always ready to tell a story, from my childhood to adulthood. They have fantastic memories, and what is notable about the film is that they tell stories together. It creates a collective sense of memory.
As they were getting older, there were moments when sometimes my mom would say, “I don’t remember, let’s ask your dad,” or my dad would say, “Oh, I’m not sure I remember, let’s ask your mom.” It was very powerful to see both my parents jogging each other’s memories.
My family has a lot of home videos, and that is also part of our memory. Watching the videos helps all of us to have a rounder sense of memory, a sense of ourselves, a sense of who we were. It’s really interesting to watch some of these videos and remember that time when my dad pulled out the video camera.
At the end of the film, my mother talks about the ways the war used to haunt her doesn’t haunt her anymore. There is a way that, over time, you want to hold on to memories, but there are things that your body and mind naturally let go of. Through this film, it’s meaningful because it’s an oral tradition that I get to experience. I have this as a part of our collective archive, not just my family’s but the world’s.
FELIX: Apocalypse Now is one of the most well-known (and controversial) Vietnam War films. Documenting your parents' live reactions as they watch the film is a unique perspective, but I’m also curious about your own. Specifically, what did it feel like to watch this film for the first time by yourself and also with your parents?
CATHY: The film played in the background of my childhood life. I don’t recall as a young person watching it from beginning to end because my parents would watch it to watch themselves. I didn’t pay much attention to it as a kid. It was part of my experience alongside Little Saigon TV, Vietnamese music, and Vietnamese news pieces. These images exist alongside Apocalypse Now for me. I always had my parents’ voices at the center of the experience, and Apocalypse Now never existed outside that context.
In college, I decided to rent [the film] at Hollywood Video. It was still the day of video cassettes, and there were a lot of videos! Apocalypse Now was a three-parter with three cassette tapes.
It was violent, and I knew that my family and the Vietnamese people weren’t considered as people. The film wasn’t interesting to me because I don’t think I connect to war stories from an American GI perspective; I don’t think I was the optimal audience.
FELIX: You wrote Split in 2014 and recently published Becoming Ghost: Poetry this year. Congratulations! I’m curious, what are some of the similarities and differences between writing poetry and writing for a short film?
CATHY: My training is primarily as a poet, so poetry is always a language I understand intrinsically. Poetry made me feel seen, it made me feel heard. It’s a language that, for me, has spoken to places of silence in a way that I felt I had been unable to engage in everyday conversation.
Split is a book about the intersection of the personal and the political, about sexual violence and war, which are uncomfortable topics to talk about. People do not have the vocabulary to talk about sexual violence and incest, so it was poetry that initially gave me my first glimpse into somebody else speaking about these subjects in a way that I could feel seen by and feel understood by.
Part of the reason why I have been writing so insistently about my family stories was because I went to the library at my alma mater, Reed College, I was looking up Vietnam War literature and Vietnam War poetry, and they were primarily through the lens of American GIs reporting back about what they had experienced. I read and appreciated those books, but they revealed this glaring lack of what was always at the center of my life and myself.
Poetry was this way of self-defining, of writing myself and my family into existence in the library, which is a space that I love.
In the same way, the film was an effort to do the same. American cinema has historically presented the Vietnam War through the lens of the US GIs and had Vietnamese people as props, never at the center. That felt like such an overwhelming erasure. The same techniques and aims that I apply in poetry, I also apply [it] in film. My focus is on shaping feelings through imagery and some level of lyricism, truth-telling, and watching through things via multiple perspectives.
I am credited as a writer, but documentary writing is written through the questions asked before we engage in the interview with my parents. It’s also written in the edit where you select what you want to say from what is gathered. In the process of editing the film, I felt very much the parallel between [that and] the process of editing a poem. You need to cut 6 hours into 15 minutes. It’s searching for the bits and putting them together in a way that is beautiful, coherent, and lyrical. It was important for me to have a full tonal range: humor, grief, and critique. It was also about honest reportage from my parents, saying it was fun in the refugee camp or that the filming didn’t feel exploitative. These are things that they felt, and I didn’t want to erase them because of my politics or desire to shape the conversation differently. My parents get to speak for themselves. They get to have an opinion that is different from mine. Audience members can access their tone of voice, their laughter very directly, whereas in poetry, it is not my parents’ words directly.
FELIX: I love how you center your parents in this short film by giving them the microphone to narrate their story. Do you have any tips for readers navigating conversations about the past with family?
CATHY: My main piece of advice is to just ask. I engaged my mother before the filming in interviews periodically. I would call her up on the phone and I would say, “I have some questions to ask you, is it okay to record them?” I don’t always know when or where some of these answers will land, but I have them as part of my repository archive and memory. Setting aside time is important because the story changes over time, as memory changes over time.
One day, you won’t have access to the stories because that’s what our lives are. That’s what time is. If you wanted the knowledge later, you couldn’t access it. My main piece of advice would be to make time to ask and record.
FELIX: Any final thoughts to leave with readers?
CATHY: I’m thinking about what it means to make art in 2025 when the country I live in is actively suppressing free speech and is actively funding multiple genocides. In the last 24 hours, 250 people in Gaza have been killed by US bombs dropped by Israeli war planes. For twenty-plus years, US military planes did that with my family and my people under false auspices, under the guise of liberation from communism.
It’s very complex because my family was also murdered by the Viet Cong (Vietnamese communists), so it’s not about laying blame, but it’s on my mind that art making must be action, a call to action.
You can see university presidents, film festivals, and institutions try to take on neutrality that only serves the state.
Within the context of the state and capitalism, might there be something outside of career-making, getting prestige, and accolades?
Are there ways we can use our art as tools to save lives?
I want to be able to imagine a different way of being, a different world. In the same way that poetry and film don’t feel separate to me, I don’t feel that making art and being a person in the world that wants to save lives feels separate. If that is separate, what are we charged to do as artists, and what does our creative imagination allow us to do in terms of organizing for a better future?
