The Protagonist

As producer, screenwriter, and director, I was looking for a story I could tell using simple and limited resources, given our significant financial constraints. The story of a friendship between two skateboarders living in the projects seemed like a good starting point. I wanted to make a
film that was fun, lighthearted, and would leave you smiling.
I was inspired by 80s adventure films like Back to the Future and Indiana Jones, the films of my childhood. I loved these films for their lightness and humor. It was thrilling to watch the heroes’ adventures, always knowing everything would be okay in the end.
As I got older, I realized that certainty never really existed. Most of the time, not everything turns out okay. Adventure means, above all, the possibility of failure.
In The Protagonist, each of our main characters fails in their own unique way. Our actions often have profound and devastating consequences, not only for ourselves, but also for those around us.
The heroes of my story are not perfect moral creations, but quite the opposite: they steal, manipulate, keep secrets from each other, and even kill. And yet we sometimes see a human glimmer shine through the rough exterior: when the cleaner Khoung lets Gonzo go with the red bag, when we’re (almost) positive that Gonzo will never sell the mix of cocaine and his dog’s ashes.
The Protagonist isn’t my biography; I have never experienced exactly what these characters experience. However, the world of the film is familiar to me: the high-rise apartment blocks, the concrete, the people you’ve got to steer clear of, and Vietnamese culture.
I come from a German-Vietnamese family. My grandmother is Vietnamese, my grandfather German. I grew up and experiences the world in the midst of these two cultures. To this day, both cultures are simultaneously familiar and yet foreign to me.
I remember my grandma patting me on the head and smiling as I’d leave the house. I remember sharing meals with my many aunts and uncles a child, trying to listen but not understanding anything. Through the story of Khoung the cleaner, I could transport some of my memories into the film, and in doing so, process them for myself in a new way.
The unusual structure of the film arose from the desire to follow each main character as long as possible, without repeating anything. The resulting cliffhangers serve as a necessary dramaturgical device to maintain the tension. To facilitate a chronological understanding, their individual stories overlap briefly.
It was very important for me to have a positive ending, or at least one that could be perceived as such. A small consolation before the future.
An attempt to delay the impending doom, just a bit longer. Even though Frank dies in the middle of the film, we end the story with a living and breathing main character. And beyond that, this character’s adventure is just beginning, with a naive, childish anticipation of the future (even if nothing good is coming). But this one moment is worth living. Let’s enjoy the sun together one last time before everything goes downhill.