ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief historical, cultural, and industrial overview of the establishment of a Vietnamese film industry in which members of the Vietnamese diaspora are able to produce films with transnational dimensions and meanings. In exploring these films and interviews, it provides a surface "Vietnamese" reading to illustrate how these films can be seen to express a vision of the Vietnamese family in line with the politics of the state, allowing them to pass censorship within Vietnam. The chapter then explores how these films as transnational texts can also become convoluted and contradictory sites of meaning, allowing positionalities to simultaneously exist for both Vietnamese and Vietnamese American audiences. It argues that media produced by diasporic Vietnamese Americans within Vietnam's media industries create transnational sites of meaning where these producers, media texts, and audiences are simultaneously Vietnamese and Viet Kieu, political traitors and economic allies, local and foreign, and familiar and other.
