Still Night, Burning House

Documentary

★ Shortlisted by Mitch Allen

Programme: TIFF Docs
Year: 2026
Runtime: 76 min
Country: Canada
Language: English / Vietnamese
Premiere: World Premiere

In her deeply personal debut feature, award-winning filmmaker Carol Nguyen charts her family’s first reunion since her uncle’s mysterious death. Travelling together to Vietnam, the family embarks on a revelatory—and at times uncanny—journey through intergenerational trauma and many-layered loss. With care and probing curiosity, Nguyen guides her loved ones as they navigate unsealed medical records and a decades-long silence, ultimately leading them back to each other. A metaphysical poem for complex mourning, Still Night, Burning House shows how storytelling can transform grief into collective healing.

From the TIFF programme

A once-close family comes together to say goodbye to an uncle who struggled with mental health issues, in award-winning short filmmaker Carol Nguyen’s tender and emotional feature-length documentary debut.

Filmmaker Carol Nguyen, whose short films Nanitic (TIFF ’22) and No Crying At the Dinner Table (TIFF ’19), earned a multitude of awards, has returned to the Festival with her much anticipated debut feature, a personal documentary on her paternal uncle’s tragic death.

With sensitivity and care, Nguyen, alongside her father, aunt and cousins, explores the story of her Uncle Thach. From his journey to Canada from Vietnam in 1983, they reveal the circumstances of his death a decade ago.

For Nguyen, whose memories of her uncle’s passing only include hushed mentions of suicide, her desire to create an understanding of him, and at the same time alleviate her father’s continued guilt, unites Thach’s loved ones. After reading thousands of pages of medical records to piece together his mental health issues and realizing how much his English comprehension exacerbated his situation, their grief is allowed to come to the forefront.

With the common goal to grieve him properly, the extended family travels to Vietnam from Toronto, and the bittersweet beauty of saying goodbye anew to Uncle Thach, in his homelands through their ceremonies, is palpable. Deeply affecting and visually stunning, this documentary allows a family to look back, come together, and see how their uncle continues to impact his young adult children’s lives today.

KELLY BOUTSALIS

Content advisory: suicide, mature themes