Working across drawing, digital animation, collage, archival material, and live action, Nguyen has developed a uniquely recognizable form of personal nonfiction in which family history and cross-cultural experience open broader questions of belonging, grief, and inherited obligation.

Her FAMU graduation project, The Little One (2017), followed a Vietnamese-Czech girl adapting to life in the Czech Republic. With Apart (2018), Nguyen established herself more firmly in the anidoc field, combining live action and animation in three testimonies of premature bereavement. The film screened at Rotterdam, BFI London, and Annecy, won Best Czech Experimental Documentary at Ji.hlava, Best Documentary at the Zlín Film Festival, and was a finalist at the BAFTA Student Film Awards.

Nguyen’s international breakthrough came with Love, Dad (2021), assembled from letters her father wrote, family photographs, live-action footage, and animated collage. Examining a relationship in which affection is inseparable from cultural and patriarchal expectations, the short confirmed her ability to transform private experience into emotionally resonant cinema with a broad international reach.

Premiering at Locarno, Love, Dad screened at more than 180 festivals and garnered over 65 awards, including the Czech Lion and the Czech Film Critics’ Award for Best Short Film. It was nominated for a European Film Award and featured in The New Yorker magazine. Selection for Cannes’ La Résidence marked the next stage in a career already extending beyond the animation circuit.

Karolína Davidová, who has worked with the director since their FAMU years and produced Love, Dad, regards Nguyen’s move into fiction as an organic progression. “Diana was bringing more and more live action into her short films,” said Davidová. “A live-action fiction film felt like the logical next step.” That step is Inbetween Worlds, Nguyen’s feature-length debut.

Family obligation, personal reckoning

The film follows Mai, a Czech-Vietnamese photography student living in Prague with her partner, Daniel. When her parents’ restaurant faces collapse because of her father’s concealed debts, the family asks her to marry Tuan, a Vietnamese man seeking Czech residency, in exchange for money that could save the business. Mai agrees and secretly travels to Vietnam for the marriage. When immigration authorities begin investigating, Tuan moves into the apartment she shares with Daniel, turning an administrative arrangement into a tense domestic reality.

The fraudulent marriage supplies the dramatic engine, but Davidová sees the film primarily as a story of delayed maturation. “The more important story is a young woman’s emancipation,” she said. “Mai is officially an adult and already has a life, but she still has to work out what her own values are and how she wants to live.” Her task is not simply to reject her family, but to establish autonomy without interpreting it as betrayal. The title refers to her bicultural position, but also to the space between duty and desire, inherited identity and self-determination.

“The space between Europe and Vietnam deepens Mai’s dilemmas,” Davidová said. “Her parents’ values are much more Vietnamese, while the second generation is often more European than Vietnamese.” Mai is portrayed by Czech-Vietnamese singer and performer Vi Tran, selected from approximately 100 young women who auditioned for the role. The nonprofessional actress is joined by David Petrželka (seen in Zuzana Kirchnerová’s Caravan) as Daniel, and Vietnamese actor Lâm Thanh Nhã as Tuan. French-Vietnamese actress Linh Dan Pham, who starred in the Oscar-winning Indochine, plays Mai’s mother, while Lê Tú Oanh and Công Ninh portray Tuan’s parents.

The combination of trained actors and newcomers led to an extended rehearsal process incorporating acting coaching, intimacy coordination, and character development. “The main challenge was to find methods that would allow Vi to forget that she was acting,” Davidová said. “We wanted acting and nonacting to exist naturally within the same film.” 

A rare Czech-Vietnamese perspective

In Czech fiction, the Vietnamese community has more often appeared at the margins than at the center. Inbetween Worlds approaches it from within, placing contemporary family life, language, work, and generational conflict at the core of the drama. The film’s world encompasses the family restaurant, Vietnamese-language conversations, wedding traditions, and Prague’s SAPA complex, a part of the city known as Little Hanoi. Through flashbacks and imagined scenes, it also looks back on Vietnamese migration to Czechoslovakia in the ’80s, before markets and convenience stores became the community’s most visible public image.

Those passages focus on people who came to work in industries such as textile production and on the families in Vietnam who sent them. Rather than presenting that history through exposition, Nguyen filters it through Mai’s memory and imagination. The production itself features Czech-Vietnamese contributors on dialogue, graphic design, food styling, and photography, including graphic designer Tuan Vuong and Slovak-Vietnamese artist Kvet Nguyen, whose practice explores hybrid identity, Vietnamese roots, and relationships between migrant parents and their European-raised children.

For the French partners, Davidová noted, the setting offered an unfamiliar perspective on the Vietnamese diaspora. “They were fascinated to discover that there had been a Vietnamese community in Czechoslovakia,” she said. “It allows the film to engage with a Vietnamese European experience, without colonial history necessarily becoming its center.”  The film places Prague and Hanoi alongside each other as actual cities rather than merely touristic backdrops. In Prague, the production focuses on less familiar locations, including AVU, Letná, and Holešovice, peripheral districts and market halls. Hanoi is filmed with the same attention to everyday texture, partly through Mai’s perspective as someone returning after a long absence.

Principal photography began with three shooting days in Vietnam in June 2026, using a predominantly Hanoi-based crew. The production then moved on to Prague, Brno, and Barrandov Studios for a further 29 shooting days across July and August. “Most of the crew in Vietnam came directly from Hanoi, and they helped us bridge every cultural gap,” Davidová said. The Hanoi section also brought established Vietnamese television and film actors into the project, selected through casting held in Vietnam.

Reality opening into animation

Formally, the project occupies an equally unusual position in Czech feature production. The planned 100-minute film combines naturalistic live action with animated photo collage. Dialogue is in Czech, Vietnamese, and English. Here Nguyen extends the technique she developed in Love, Dad, although the relationship between the two media has shifted. While the short intermingled photographs and filmed material with a predominantly animated surface, Inbetween Worlds uses collage selectively, entering Mai’s memories, fears, fantasies, and emotional associations when behavior and dialogue can no longer convey them.

“What makes the film distinctive is that the animated scenes bring us into the protagonist’s inner world,” Davidová said. “They allow us to work with associations, memories, and the emotional quality of images.” Nguyen cites Past Lives and The Worst Person in the World as touchstones, for their empathy toward imperfect characters and their reliance on glances, gestures, and what remains unspoken, with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as a formal model for allowing imagination and memory to enter reality without undermining its emotional credibility.

“For Inbetween Worlds,” Nguyen said, “I was looking for a similar balance to remain grounded in authentic reality while allowing the audience to experience what is happening inside the protagonist, the things that cannot easily be expressed in words.” Nguyen developed the visual language with cinematographer Dušan Husár (Arved, A Sensitive Person), animation art director Adéla Križovenská, and the production-design team. “Each part has to work according to its own logic,” Davidová said, “but in the end they have to understand one another.”

A European-Asian connection

Inbetween Worlds is produced by Davidová’s Czech company 13ka and coproduced by Slovakia’s nutprodukcia, France’s Tripode Productions, and Singapore’s Momo Film. The addition of Momo Film expands the project into a formal European-Asian coproduction, matching a story whose cultural and production logic moves between Central Europe and Southeast Asia. The project participated in Cannes La Résidence, KVIFF Talents, EAVE Ties That Bind, Berlinale Talents’ Script Station, Gotham Project Market, and IFF Rotterdam’s CineMart, where it received the ArteKino Award. It also won the Czech Film Foundation’s Best Screenplay Award.

Editing will begin after the summer shoot, alongside development of the animated sequences. Animation production is scheduled to intensify in the autumn and continue through the winter. The producers aim to have a festival screener by the end of February 2027, and complete final postproduction in spring 2027. Several international sales agents are following the project, though none is yet attached.