We Were the Scenery

​​At the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che fled their country in a makeshift boat. A nine-day journey took them to the Philippines, to a camp housing around a hundred refugees. The couple were then recruited as extras on the set of Apocalypse Now, part of which was filmed in the stunning natural surroundings of Baler Bay, in the north-east of the archipelago. A comical collision between two worlds that caricature each other, two realities that overlap... Directed by Christophe Radcliff and written by the poet Cathy Linh Che, who is also the daughter of the protagonists, We Were the Scenery pokes fun at the translation between reality and fiction, past and present, life and cinema. A first-person narrative, supported by a 16 mm home movie, is interwoven with footage from that iconic film, a Western exhortation against war and violence. A critical discourse, but not without humour, on our collective narratives, colonisation and our relationship to the Other.

Bastien Bento

We Were the Scenery, 2025
Appocalips, 2023
Lost Episode, 2019
The Strange Ones, 2017
Jonathan's Chest, 2014
The Strange Ones, 2011