Ba's Book

Programme: TIFF Docs
Year: 2026
Runtime: 93 min
Country: Canada
Language: English / Vietnamese
Premiere: World Premiere

Production/Post-production. After a father writes a memoir in the form of letters to his daughter about his harrowing experiences of the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution, the daughter responds by making a film.

From the TIFF programme

In a hybrid documentary retelling, documentary filmmaker Ashley Duong takes her father’s memoir and stages a recreation of it in Vietnam alongside her family.

Ba’s Book is a documentary recreation inside a documentary, inspired by a memoir. Fascinated by the idea that her quiet father has recently put his entire life story — including growing up in a Vietnamese village during the Vietnam war, and a brief foray into Iran — into a book, written as a series of letters to her, documentary filmmaker Ashley Duong gamely decides to adapt his written word for the screen.

After the stops and starts of convincing him and her mother to go back to Vietnam, something they’ve never done as a family, they journey to his former village for a heartwarming reunion with his siblings. The family members are actively involved in bringing his memoir to life, helping to cast the younger versions of themselves, giving notes to the actors, and assisting in the building of the set (a recreation of the home they grew up in.) The doc cleverly uses the process of the recreation to pull out even more memories, particularly in a beautiful scene when the filmmaker’s father and the actor portraying him connect about the character.

Duong artfully creates enough space between their emotional trauma and the staging of the pre-production and production of a film to give her family the chance to breathe, as well as agency in their own stories. Produced by Ina Fichman (Fire of Love; Monsoon, TIFF ’14), Ba’s Book is an earnest look at memory and legacy.

KELLY BOUTSALIS

Content advisory: mature themes