For the month of December, Vtape is proud to present Trâm Anh Nguyễn’s to boyhood, i never knew him (2022) free online. The Images Festival 2025 recently announced that Trâm Anh‘s film won the York University Award for Best Student Work, and we congratulate him on this well-deserved success!

This month’s Staff Pick was selected by our new Technical Manager, Dylan Adamson, who shares his thoughts on the film:

“Trâm Anh Nguyễn’s to boyhood, i never knew him (2022) pairs heavily artifacted and distorted video recordings of Nguyen’s pre-transition childhood in Vietnam with a poem written by the filmmaker to memorialize a gap in his subjecthood. Trâm Anh’s images present a smiling child, seen often at birthdays or other celebrations, while the text grieves a missing chapter of his autobiography. The filmmaker writes of the work, “i remember being a girl but i don’t,” and it’s this fundamental being/not being that seems to pull these jaggedly pixelated images together and apart. As new forms are discovered in their dissolution, a sense of loss never totally leaves the frame. Discordant and sensorily overwhelming, the winner of the Best Student Work award at Images Festival 2025 streams free with Vtape for the month of December.”

Trâm Anh Nguyễn is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in filmmaking and photography, based in Vietnam and Toronto. His works bind documentation and storytelling with a backdrop of silent poetry, focusing on queerness and its intricate politics as connects to his Vietnamese familial roots. He currently attends the School of Image Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University. Other works of his in distribution with Vtape include Hoa (2022) and Landscape of our Body (2024).