Forest Medicine
“I believe that our healing journey is a Universal one. During this intense time, the Rainbow Prophecy reveals that profound change is happening in small communities. There is an opportunity for an Awakening and this film aims to alchemize trauma into beauty. Honoring the indigenous, plant medicine and ceremony, “Forest Medicine” offers a way through.
If you would like to support this project and become an ally,
Past films
Films are a chamber of dreams where poems, dances, stories and prayer offerings live. There is imaginative storytelling about possible selves. What we see are collage-like constructions, tied to different emotions and experiences. Inspired by the indigenous notions that we are part of the world, nature and the Universe, Nguyen aims her camera as an act of love. Grateful to all soul family participating and co-dreaming alongside them on this journey as they seek truth, in praise of shadows.
“Love is the Score” (2021) 20 minutes
This is a performative work that celebrates Nguyen’s love for improvised dance and music. “Both a dance score and music score can induce this trance-like state, a temporal reality, that can illuminate and stretch our consciousness.”
The work grieves and celebrates life and love in all its sublime states of letting go.
Directed, written, photographed, music supervised and edited by Love Nguyen.
“Ancient Futures” (2022)
The privilege to travel, has given me varying perspectives on what we all deserve as humans. There are more important things than work, money and convenience. Creating and discovering together, witnessing. I would love to live in a world where we simply bartered again. Where we all took care of each other. Where our days weren’t dictated by clocks but by our bodies and the sun, the weather and moon. This made me reach further back to a way of life that honors nature and living a life with an awareness for how we affect seven generations forward. What can we contribute rather than take away? Our indigenous friends can remind us of who we once were and bring us back to highest selves.
We were never born and never die.
In the words of buddhist bodhisattva and peace advocate, Thich Nhat Hanh, “We are never born and We never die.” He preached the concept, that we are merely continuations of a force. So this energy is forever flowing. In our lifetime, this flow must be tended to, cleared and nurtured because it will enter many other transformational stages and forms. When I was in Bali, I attended a cremation ceremony. The entire village is welcome. I was encouraged to witness. When asking the gamelan players about their role in the ceremony, the responded, “We are here to uplift the people’s spirits. We never want someone to remain in their suffering or grief.” A lot of people had raw grains of rice on their foreheads. “This is also a reminder, to be grateful for this gift that nourishes our bodies daily.” I made a short film for my Death Doula group back in California to share my new wisdoms from other cultures and how they process grief, together.
nguyen
Vietnamese-american artist
Love Nguyen is a Santa Barbara-based artist directing their first long format about healing and trauma with the working title, “Forest Medicine”.
NEws
Love Nguyen is currently in development of “Forest Medicine” their first long-format film and just launched our fundraising campaign.
Their work is included in the inaugural exhibition, “Whisper Their Sinful Names” at Chez Max et Dorothea in Los Angeles. Runs January 18 - March 8, 2024.
They are currently participating in an artist residency at the esteemed Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans to dig deeper into work investigating identity and community from Feb. 5 - March 16, 2024.
How I travel, how i move
There’s an otherness that I exist in, in both America and Vietnam as an immigrant. I have had to do a lot of work about feeling belonging and sense of home. I feel invited by indigenous tribes who have put forth the stories that we are One People, the Brazilians and Vietnamese. So, it feels like, I enter into this pre-colonial, pre-continental drift zone where there’s an acceptance and rewriting of me as an ancestral and infinite “both-ness” instead of feeling a perpetual “neither-ness”. I have been mistaken for the indigenous, by Colombians.
When I’m photographing or filming, I’m low to the ground and softly listening, becoming indigenous with my lens. Interested in mapping cultures, ceremonies and connecting with its multi-layered intentionalities. My artistic journey is a healing one, that charges the work with its power and purity. I have a female sensibility that listens to the moments for filming. The intuition is developing and the mind is quiet to receive cues-open to change and each special moment’s vibrations.
I enjoy going to where the locals are, to befriend them and really feel their heart and be open. As a visitor, I am treading as a female empath, not a conqueror, not a scientist.