Sunday Menu – the Fillm

Sunday Menu (2011, 24 min.) is a quiet, atmospheric short film that follows Mi, a young Vietnamese-German woman navigating generational and cross-cultural conflicts in Berlin. After a tense encounter with her mother, Hanh – who speaks heavily accented German and refuses to communicate with Mi in Vietnamese – she seeks solace with her grandmother, Bà. In contrast to her strained relationship with Hanh, Mi finds comfort in Bà’s warm Vietnamese words, cherished family photo albums, and beloved recipes, which offer a ritualistic connection to her cultural roots.

The film also introduces Mi’s slightly older cousin, Thai, who appears confident and seemingly well-assimilated into German society. However, beneath his composed exterior lie unspoken struggles, subtly revealed in a conversation with Hanh in Vietnamese, hinting at immigration issues. While Thai seems to successfully straddle both German and Vietnamese worlds, Mi grapples with feelings of alienation, caught between her fragmented familial ties and her search for identity.

Through a series of atmospheric scenes across Berlin, Sunday Menu traces Mi’s inner conflict as she visits sites associated with the Vietnamese diaspora in former socialist East Germany, including Lichtenberg and Marzahn, as well as western Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel. These locations – marked by sprawling grey landscapes and anonymous social housing – mirror Mi’s emotional isolation while contrasting with the intimate, sensory spaces of food and family. The film’s visual language relies on close-ups, body language, colour, and sound to convey Mi’s interior world, with quiet, elliptical pacing and long, static shots that evoke both confinement and the possibility of escape.

Montage sequences, surreal encounters, and silent moments reflect the characters’ emotional landscapes, while minimal, stilted dialogue underscores the limitations and ambivalence of cultural translation. A brief montage of archival photos documenting the Vietnamese presence in Berlin offers a poignant reminder of the sociopolitical context subtly shaping the characters’ private lives. Mi’s exploration of a bustling Vietnamese market in Berlin serves as an impressionistic link to the diaspora’s lived reality in Germany.

Sunday Menu premiered at the 2011 Berlinale – Berlin International Film Festival in the Culinary Kino section and was screened at the San Francisco Diasporic Vietnamese Film Festival, Imagineindia International Film Festival in Madrid, Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, YxineFF Online Film Festival in Vietnam, as well as at various venues in Berlin and Paris. 

It was my diploma film, concluding my studies in the montage department at HFF Konrad Wolf (Academy of Film and Television) in Babelsberg, just outside Berlin. I wrote and directed the film under the artist name Liesl Nguyen and edited it under my given name, Alisa Anh Kotmair. The film was loosely inspired by, and includes quotes from, Phạm Thị Hoài’s amazing short story “Thực đơn Chủ nhật” (trans. to English by Tôn Thất Quỳnh Du as “Sunday Menu” and into German by Dietmar Erdmann as “Sonntagsmenü”).