About the Exhibition.

TMR is pleased to present the West Coast premiere of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film The Island (2017). The film was shot entirely on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast of Malaysia that became the largest and longest-operating refugee camp after the Vietnam War. The artist and his family were some of the 250,000 people who inhabited the small island between 1978 and 1991. After the UN High Commissioner for Refugees closed the camp the jungle began to devour many of the man-made structures—leaving behind crumbling monuments and relics. 

Set in a dystopian future, Nguyen casts the island as both a character and a precarious place of refuge—this time, for the sole survivors of a world-consuming nuclear war. A man who stayed behind after the refugee camp on the island was closed encounters a scientist who is washed ashore after surviving the nuclear war. The characters grapple with their existence and their responsibilities to both the past and future. Their exchanges become charged metaphors for the contradictory condition that shapes many refugees--for the necessity to remember and honor a traumatic past while ensuring it does not overwhelm the possibilities of a different future. Interspersed with archival news footage of the Vietnamese refugee crisis and recordings of people who once called the island home, the film lyrically displaces the anxieties and investments of the present with a sweeping cinematic vision that, like the waters surrounding the titular land-mass, both envelopes and rejects; transports and entraps; brings home, and sets adrift.