Travelling Distribution

We Were The Scenery

A film by

Christopher Radcliff

Synopsis

In 1975, after fleeing Vietnam by boat for the Philippines, a newly married couple are recruited from their refugee camp to reenact the war as background extras in a major U.S. blockbuster about the Vietnam War.

Highlights

- 90+ festivals
- 98th Academy Awards® Shortlist - Best Documentary Short Film

Tags

2025

No items found.

Documentary

Genre

No items found.

Country

USA, Canada

Year

2025

Length

14'45"

Themes

Social Justice

Third Age

Immigration

Mixed Media

Social and cultural identity

Trauma

BIPOC

Distribution
Hoa Thị Lê Chế, Huệ Nguyên Chế
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Production
Cathy Linh Che, Jess X. Snow
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Executive Production
Su Kim, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kelly Marie Tran, Sevasti Buford, Akemi Look, David Moon Ki Lee, Andreas Nicholas, Anthony Dinh Tran, Mingran Yamira Yang
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Screenplay
Cathy Linh Che
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Images
Jess X. Snow
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Editing
Christopher Radcliff
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Sound
Quyên Nguyen-Le
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Sound Design
Haina Zhou, Mackie Mallison
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Music
Eliot Leigh

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Director's Statement

WE WERE THE SCENERY, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and won the Short Film Jury Award in Nonfiction, is the product of a multi-year creative collaboration between myself and Vietnamese American writer Cathy Linh Che, whose parents are the central subjects of the film. It tells the story of their journey as refugees from the Vietnam War, when they found themselves utilized as extras during the filming of Francis Ford Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW. Formally, the film takes a diasporic daughter’s perspective and is guided by their personal recollections. It pairs intimate audio of her parents’ narration with a stream of imagery drawn from newly produced verité footage, the family’s extensive home video archive, and APOCALYPSE NOW itself, digitized from the parents’ sole VHS copy of the film, which they recorded from a television broadcast.The effort to tell this story has taken us through four years, three countries, and multiple formats including film, digital, and Super 8. It has generated several projects across artistic forms including prose, poetry, a multichannel video installation (commissioned by The Shed in NYC), and finally culminates with this documentary film. Our hope is to share this film with festival audiences worldwide in 2025, which marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. It also comes at a moment when a new generation of refugees and the realities of war once again enter our global consciousness. No other video-documented first-person accounts from the extras of APOCALYPSE NOW exist, and this film illuminates faces, voices, and stories erased from the master narrative, moving them from the background of the frame into the foreground. In doing so, we hope to challenge our long-held regard for this canonical film, and by extension, the iconography and imagination of the Vietnam War.

Christopher Radcliff, Cathy Linh Che, Jess X Snow

Christopher Radcliff

Christopher Radcliff is an award-winning filmmaker whose work has screened at festivals worldwide and online via Criterion, Short of the Week, and Lé Cinema Club. His latest film WE WERE THE SCENERY received the Short Film Jury Award for Nonfiction at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Filmography

Social media

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Festivals

98th Academy Awards® - Shortlist - Best Documentary Short Film

Sundance Film Festival, USA | 2025 * World Premiere, * Short Film Jury Award for Non-Fiction
Visions du Réel, Switzerland | 2025 *International Premiere
LA Asian Pacific Film Festival, USA | 2025 * SPECIAL JURY PRIZE FOR DOCUMENTARY SHORT
Galway Film Fleadh, Ireland | 2025 *Best International Short Documentary Film
Asian American International Film Festival, USA | 2025 *Excellence in Short Filmmaking Documentary award & Audience Award
Dokufest, Kosovo | 2025 *Best International Short Dox
Kaohsiung Int. Short Film Festival, Taïwan | 2025 *Jury special mention
San Diego Asian Film Festival, USA | 2025 *Best Documentary Short
SIMA Awards, USA | 2026 *Jury special mention

Press Inquiries

Publicity
‍David Magdael | dmagprteam@dmagpr.com
‍
‍Marketing
‍Erin Owens | erin@longshotfactory.com

Press Kit

Electronic Press Kit

External Links

Letterboxd
↗ Vimeo Staff Picks - Best of 2025
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‍Criterion
↗ The Other Side of the Apocalypse: A Conversation on We Were the Scenery
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‍Film Comment
↗ The Best Shorts of 2025
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‍Talking Shorts
↗ Listed: Top 3 of 2025 : Filmmakers, Programmers and Critics Pick This Year’s Most Remarkable Short Films
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Short of the Week
↗ We Were the Scenery
↗ Surveying the Oscar Contenders: Documentary Short Film

Social media

Instagram

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