Generational trauma is one of the obvious shared themes of films New Wave (2024) and Sentimental Value (2025), both recently screened at Yale by the Asian American Cultural Center (AACC) and Yale Film Society, respectively. These two films seem to be part of a larger cultural interest in engaging with the topic: Aftersun (2023), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Encanto (2021).
In New Wave, first-time documentarian Elizabeth Ai journeys into the Vietnamese-American New Wave music scene in 1980s SoCal. In the process, the director reckons with her own family’s escape from Vietnam during the war and her relationship with her absent mother. In Sentimental Value, Norwegian Oscar-nominated director Joachim Trier follows a pair of sisters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Their estranged father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), reunites with the sisters after their mother’s passing. Gustav then tries to cast Nora in a film about his own mother’s suicide after the Nazi occupation. In both films, the specter of war looms over a family, and the absence of parents haunts the grown-up children. In New Wave and Sentimental Value, Ai and Nora both try to find the answer to healing.
Both stories center the creation of art. Characters sublimate their personal suffering into the artistic creations: music and performance for New Wave, and film-making and acting for Sentimental Value. However, neither film paints a rosy picture of art as an easy path to deliverance.
We see Lynda Trang Đài’s massive success as one of the most famous performers in the new wave scene. Next, we watch her stand on the sideline of a football stadium, almost missing her son’s high school graduation because of work. Her son, raised mostly by his grandparents, only smiles cordially as his mother hugs and kisses him. The film doesn’t shy away from paradox: the very figure giving a sense of belonging to a generation of teens starved of parental attention is herself the absent parent.
After a retrospective screening of Gustav’s Tarkovsky-esque film with Agnes as the main character, famous American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) is drowning in tears, but Gustav, who hasn’t made a film in 15 years, looks stoic and pensive. For Gustav, who still speaks Swedish to his Norwegian-speaking daughters, the joyful memories of the film’s creation process are overshadowed by regret for the lost potential of closeness with his daughters. If making art fails to untangle the knot of the family for the artists, then what’s the answer to healing?
During the Q&A following AACC’s screening, Ai noted that she had started New Wave as a more conventional project about the history of the new wave music scene, with no intention of incorporating personal history. The research process of making the earlier version of the film involved interviewing people about their memories of the past and collecting their personal collection of photographs. This dive into history is mirrored in Sentimental Value. Agnes, an academic historian, requests to see archival documents containing re-enactment photos of tortures her grandmother endured for her anti-Nazi efforts during the occupation. Researching into history gave Ai and Agnes the permission to reconsider their past, and the past of their loved ones. Importantly, the facts from the research matter less than the experience of the research itself.
When Agnes holds the beige folder with the photographs of half-joking policemen playing the roles of perpetrator and victim, tears fall down her face. She knows the fact of torture, but at this moment, the implicit knowledge of the past realizes in front of her eyes, in a cruel, imperfect, and elliptic way. The research process allows the transformation of the distant knowledge of the past into an immediate experience in the present.
This experience, however, is not the past, but a representation of the past. The film, through its formal elements, reminds us that what we’re seeing is a romanticized interpretation and that we’re limited to interpretations of the past. When Ian “DJ bpm” Nguyen narrates his personal story of becoming a DJ through a re-enactment of his past conversation with his father, the cinematography changes from talking heads to dramatic low-key lighting. Representation of experiences in the film are neither fiction nor truth–or, maybe, are both at the same time.
Trier destabilizes the audience’s concept of verisimilitude constantly by cutting between the diegesis of the film itself and the play within the film with fluidity and deliberation. Through these cuts, he coyly gestures towards the blurry line between fiction and reality. The importance of interpretation reveals itself when Agnes pushes the script across the desk, telling Nora the film is not a simple retelling as they thought. Interpretation is then a reexamination of the past in the present: it concerns the past, but it reflects the present.
Ai says in New Wave, “In someone’s absence, assumption becomes your truth.” In making the first version of the film, she explored her past. Instead of fleeing from the past like Nora or denying it like Gustav, she opens herself up to be changed by the art she’s making. Art might not be the magic potion, but it is a potent way of providing artists and audience with the space and time for interpretation.
In New Wave and Sentimental Value, the work of reckoning with inherited histories lies in the invitation of such interpretation. The difference between interpretation and taking someone else’s perspective is the acknowledgement of the shakiness of one’s personal experience, the possibility of coexistence of seemingly incompatible truths, and the liberty gained from the end of ownership of such perspectives. What we need, perhaps, is an olive branch to our parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, not unlike the unstapled script Gustav pulls out from a plastic bag that seems to say “when our interpretations come together, we can shape something beautiful.”
