Private Project

Our Love Utopia

Five young creatives in Ho Chi Minh City are asked to imagine a dating app on which their profiles would be shown as bedrooms that they design. Disappointed in current online dating options, they take the chance to imagine alternative modes of self-representation in order to seek connections from the virtual world. The exercise brings them to reveal their desires and fears in their search for intimacy.

  • Lien Pham
    Director
  • Barack Huy
    Key Cast
  • Giang An
    Key Cast
  • Dat Tien Vu
    Key Cast
  • Dat Vinh Tran
    Key Cast
  • Mat Bet
    Key Cast
  • Tina Le Nguyen
    Music Composer
  • Tran N Nguyen
    Graphic Design
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short, Student
  • Runtime:
    19 minutes 27 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    June 14, 2021
  • Production Budget:
    650 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Viet Nam
  • Country of Filming:
    Viet Nam
  • Language:
    English, Vietnamese
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    Yes - School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University
Director Biography - Lien Pham

Lien Pham (b. 1997) is currently completing her BFA in Studio Arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Lien's multi-media work is mainly composed of photography and video, documenting and critiquing the intimacies that exist within the sites and relationships of her own and her communities’. Our Love Utopia, a short documentary, is her first film.

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Director Statement

As an image-based visual artist, I became interested in the film medium's ability to record intimate details in conversations, that photography cannot fully convey. Deep and meaningful conversations between people foster reflections, and reveal to us who we are. Our Love Utopia, a documentary, was born this way - out of the desire to converse, to reach new understandings of ourselves. I created the question of "if there was a dating app on which you can design a bedroom to represent yourself, would you use it and how?" to start dialogues with friends about how we are representing ourselves and our desires on dating apps. Although started out as a a fun experiment to imagine how much better online dating can be, the experiment soon revealed our inability to reconcile the differences between virtual representations and our real desires.