Trinh T. Minh-ha Still Sets Her Own Rules – and Heads to ‘The Undying Desert’ in Her First Film Set in the U.S. (EXCLUSIVE)

Vietnamese-American filmmaker, writer, feminist and post-colonial theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha is readying her upcoming film “The Undying Desert.”

“I’ve just finished editing it,” she told Variety at Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival, where she’s celebrating a retrospective.

“I’ve made films in Africa, China, Vietnam and Japan, and people would ask: ‘When are you going to make a film about the U.S.?’ They were right, because I live there.”

She has been shooting in the Great Basin Desert for almost two decades.

“A desert is huge, majestic and beautiful. At the same time, it’s considered ‘arid’ by colonizing forces. All these prejudices about what a desert is still exist in our language. But it’s actually very lively,” she stated.

In “The Undying Desert,” she examines people’s relationship with it.

“For me, this film is closely related to the way of life of indigenous people, especially Native Americans. The other theme has to do with why we go to the desert in the first place. It wipes away every notion that allows us to conform to certain ways of life. Suddenly, you don’t have to be polite or compete with others. You go there to be with your true self.”

Not everyone is ready for that, though.

“Some just use it as a terrain for sports. They’re there, but they are not with the desert. Native Americans see the desert as layers and layers of life, but it’s even more radical. They always remember that their ancestors are with them too. Life and death go together.”

Trinh T. Minh-ha is not finished with this subject just yet – she started working on another film immediately after “The Undying Desert.” Co-directed with longtime collaborator Jean-Paul Bourdieu, it will also be set there.

“In the Great Basin Desert, there are groups of people who isolate themselves and turn this location into a research center for Mars. They plan to go there and colonize another planet,” she said.

“With every one of these trips to the desert, I could see myself changing. I was learning how I feel and what the desert actually brings me.”

With works such as “Forgetting Vietnam,” “Surname Viet Given Name Nam,” “Reassemblage” and “What About China?,” she never focuses on individual stories.

“It’s like poetry, where the ‘I’ is collective. You’re inviting people to come in,” she explained.

“I’ve always been engaged in politics, but as Jean-Luc Godard also noticed, there’s a difference between the political and politics. Everything we do can be political. This is particularly relevant for women because we’re very attuned to everyday activities. If you remain blind to that, you might make a political film about a progressive subject. But the way you treat it can be very regressive. When you turn the camera toward someone else, you also have to turn it toward yourself.”

For Trinh T. Minh-ha, “cinema is not just an experience for the eyes.”

“It’s an experience for the whole body. When I was first showing ‘Reassemblage,’ someone told me: ‘I’m hearing this film with my eyes and seeing it with my ears.’ I replied: ‘Perfect’,” she smiled.

“In East Asia, the senses are not that separate. They overlap. A painter is also a musician and a poet. I think it’s the same with film. It’s better to come with an open mind and see how it speaks to you, rather than focusing on what constitutes a ‘good documentary,’ or what its story or message is.”

That’s what she tells emerging filmmakers, too.

“You set up the rules for yourself. I’m very glad that I was able to stick with the path I chose and not be intimidated by all these oppressive regulations.”

Documentary filmmakers have more leeway today, she argued. But that doesn’t mean one should take all this freedom for granted.

“On the contrary, you have to be much more responsible because you are the one setting the rules. When people ask if your film is fiction or documentary, you have to find a way to talk to them. And say: ‘Why do you need to know?’ Of course, you don’t always succeed. Even after so many years of making films, producers or programmers are not immediately interested in my work. But I’m still building my audience.”