STILL NIGHT, BURNING HOUSE to Premiere at Toronto Film Festival
The Metafilms, NFB and Portage Films co-production follows Carol Nguyen's family confronting an uncle's mysterious death in Vietnam.
Vietnamese-Canadian filmmaker Carol Nguyen's feature documentary debut, STILL NIGHT, BURNING HOUSE, is set to make its world premiere in the Toronto International Film Festival's TIFF Docs program, which showcases the year's non-fiction filmmaking. The Metafilms, National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and Portage Films co-production follows the director's Toronto-based family as they travel to Vietnam to confront long-unspoken questions surrounding an uncle's mysterious death.
The festival will also host the September 16 world premiere of the NFB/TIFF short documentary initiative REDEFINED, in which five next-generation filmmakers from across the country explore the diversity of Canadian and Indigenous identity and celebrate the differences that unite as a country.
TIFF 2026 runs September 10–20.
About Carol Nguyen's Still Night, Burning House (76 min)
Producers: Audrey-Ann Dupuis-Pierre (Portage Films); Robert Vroom and Ariel Nasr (NFB)
Executive producers: Sylvain Corbeil (Metafilms), Nathalie Cloutier (NFB), Bob Moore (EyeSteelFilm) and Anh Duy Vo Dinh (Spotlight Production)
In Still Night, Burning House, Carol Nguyen chronicles her family's first gathering since her uncle's mysterious death over a decade ago.
Travelling together to Vietnam, the family embarks on a transformative journey through intergenerational trauma, mental health and deeply layered loss. With profound care, trust and immediacy, Nguyen guides them as they navigate unsealed medical records and long-unspoken questions. How can we grieve if we've never been given the chance to be sad?
Still haunted by guilt, Nguyen's father's search for answers via collective rituals and solitary meanderings soon leads him into the uncanny.
A metaphysical poem for complex mourning, Nguyen's feature debut shows how storytelling can turn grief and regret into healing, hope and a kinship restored.
About the filmmaker
Carol Nguyen is a Montreal-based, Vietnamese-Canadian filmmaker whose films explore themes of cultural identity, family and silence. Her short film Nanitic (2022) was screened at the Berlinale and TIFF. No Crying at the Dinner Table (2019) was shown at TIFF, IDFA and South by Southwest, where it won the Jury Prize for Short Documentary. Carol is currently working on several projects, including a feature-length fiction selected for the TIFF Writer's Studio in 2025.
STILL NIGHT, BURNING HOUSE marks Carol Nguyen's most personal work to date and serves as a follow-up and companion piece to her 2019 short NO CRYING AT THE DINNER TABLE, which was named to Canada's Top Ten, TIFF's annual list of the country's best films.
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