Ashley Duong had known her father as a quiet man, a former engineer who kept his past folded away. Then, in 2021, Anh Duong handed his daughter a thick manuscript: a memoir written as a series of letters to her, chronicling his childhood in war-torn Vietnam, his escape, and his coming of age during the Iranian Revolution. The result is Ba's Book, a 103-minute documentary that opens in U.S. theaters on September 15, 2026, and marks Ashley Duong's directorial debut.
The film, shot over four years across three countries, traces Anh Duong's journey from a village near Da Nang to Tehran, where his family relocated in the mid-1970s, and finally to Southern California. Rather than narrate her father's story in voiceover, Ashley Duong built the documentary around his own words, read aloud in English by the director herself. The memoir's letters form the spine of the film, interspersed with archival footage from the Vietnam War and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, as well as present-day scenes of father and daughter retracing his steps.
"I thought I knew my father," Ashley Duong said in a statement. "The letters showed me a man who had survived things he never spoke about at the dinner table. Making this film was my way of answering him."
That answer took shape slowly. Anh Duong, now in his late sixties, wrote the letters over a decade, initially without any intention of publication. According to the director, he typed them on an old typewriter in a garage office, addressing each one to "my dear daughter" and signing them with a date. When Ashley Duong first read the manuscript in full, she said she felt "like I was meeting him for the first time." She began filming conversations with him in 2022, eventually expanding the project to include visits to Vietnam and Iran, though the Iranian portions were shot primarily in archival form due to travel restrictions.
The documentary's structure mirrors the memoir's epistolary form. Each chapter opens with a line from a letter, translated into English for the film and spoken by Ashley Duong. The letters describe Anh Duong's early memories of the war, including the night his family fled their home; his teenage years in Tehran, where he witnessed both the opulence of the Shah's regime and the upheaval of the revolution; and his eventual immigration to the United States, where he studied engineering and raised a family. The film does not shy away from the harder passages, including a letter in which Anh Duong recounts a period of depression after arriving in California.
Ba's Book also features Duy Nguyen, a family friend and archivist who helped digitize home movies and photographs from the Duong family collection. Nguyen appears on camera in several scenes, discussing the challenges of reconstructing a life from fragmented evidence. The film's runtime of 103 minutes allows room for both the historical sweep and the intimate exchanges between father and daughter, which were shot largely in the family's Orange County home.
The film premiered earlier this year on the festival circuit, though it has yet to register a rating on TMDb, where it currently sits at 0/10 based on insufficient votes. USA Film News was unable to confirm a domestic distributor at press time, but the September 15 release date has been locked for several months, according to a person close to the production.
For Ashley Duong, the project represents both a personal reckoning and a formal experiment. She is credited as director, writer, and editor, and she appears throughout the film as both interviewer and subject. The dual role creates a tension that the documentary leans into: the daughter who wants answers and the filmmaker who knows that some questions have no clean resolution. In one sequence, Anh Duong declines to discuss a particular wartime episode, and the camera lingers on his silence. Later, a letter provides the context he could not speak aloud.
The documentary arrives at a moment when first-person family histories are enjoying renewed attention, from My Father's Vietnam to The Act of Killing. But Ba's Book distinguishes itself by its layered geography. Vietnam and Iran rarely share screen space in American documentaries, and Anh Duong's biography links them through the accident of his family's migration. The film treats both revolutions as parallel forces that shaped a single life, without collapsing their differences.
Anh Duong, for his part, has said he never expected his letters to become a film. "I wrote them so my daughter would know where she came from," he said. "Now strangers will know too. That is strange, but maybe it is good."
Ba's Book opens in select theaters on September 15, 2026.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
