About Nam Nguyen

I was raised in central New Jersey where the challenge was to find a sense of realness and place amidst suburban sprawl. If you want meaningful culture in the suburbs you have to build it yourself from unlikely combinations of the human, geographic, and pop-cultural resources at hand. Judging by the people I have seen, the minds that actually manage to grow in the suburbs often burn all the brighter for the dry conditions. My experience of New Jersey, despite the state's often banal facade, was a Henry IV style revelry among colorful friends. I think of psychedelic basement recordings, a maintenance parking area made into the center of the world by a meaningful conversation, theremons, rhotovibes, merry voices, sonorous through the Princeton fog, and the smell of the salt and the mist over the Atlantic Ocean at three am.

Though the subject matter of Heather Court 5am is informed by the same environmental factors that influence Kevin Smith's movies (New Jersey, Star Wars etc), I am aiming more toward the genre that is defined by the slow paced tactile realism of Andrei Tarkovsky (in films like Andrei Rublev), the stately and architectonic formalism of Stanley Kubrick, and the low budget, resourceful, patch-working of late Orson Welles (films like Chimes at Midnight and Othello.) And perhaps to the chagrin of the culture warriors in my parents' generation, my world view remains heavily influenced by the simple humanism of Star Wars.

I just finished my BFA at the University of Pennsylvania and I am currently living in Philadelphia with my girlfriend Samantha. Heather Court 5am is my first film and I am currently sketching out some new projects that will continue to explore the relationship between the past, present, and future.