Nan Faith’s feature film “Mom,” a fictional documentary with elements set in New York’s Chinatown and featuring the true owners of a famous Vietnamese restaurant in Lower Manhattan, will be screened at SXSW. Variety has an exclusive clip from the movie.
The film centers on Gerald, a self-taught chef from a small town in Texas. Driven by a passion for Vietnamese cuisine, Gerald came to New York City with dreams of opening his own restaurant. Lacking money and time, he finds an unlikely partner in Nung, a Vietnamese waitress, and the two hatch a plan to overcome the hustle and bustle of the city and work in underground kitchens to achieve their goals.
This is a story about true friendship and an obsession with cooking, values that go far beyond the script. The film stars Gerard Head and Nguyen Dao Head, an American-Vietnamese couple who run Mam, the Vietnamese restaurant on Forsyth Street that inspired the project.
For Fakes, the path to the film was through his longtime friend and casting director for the film, Anh Nguyen Xuan. Anh Nguyen Xuan is a French-Vietnamese New Yorker who ran his own Vietnamese restaurant for nearly 20 years before they began developing the project together. Fakes’ early short film “Banh Mi Quest,” set in Chinatown and shot in Super 16mm, laid the foundation for the aesthetic approach he would bring to this feature.
“‘Mom’ is a fiction that draws all its elements from reality,” Feakes told Variety. A commitment to authenticity shaped every aspect of production. Working with cinematographer Matt Batchelor, Fakes shot the film over 16 days using Super 16mm in completely natural light with a crew of six. The entire cast, from the leads to the background players, was chosen from the surrounding area. On set, Feeks completed each shot in two takes, a constraint he explains as essential to the film’s energy.
“I like the sense of danger, like walking a tightrope,” he says. “It makes the moment feel stronger and more intense.”
His touchstones are the sensuous, elliptical filmmaking of Wong Kar-wai and Tsai Ming-liang on the one hand, and the dynamic street-level tension of the Safdie brothers on the other. Feeks says he is drawn to the “thin line between documentary and fiction.” Because it makes the storytelling feel intense, almost visceral.
For Gerald Head, getting in front of the camera meant tackling a whole new field with the same mindset he brings to the kitchen. “I approached everything like a job,” he says. His path to owning Mumm was similarly pragmatic. What began as a weekend pop-up at Nguyen Xuan’s restaurant in 2020 quickly outgrew its origins, and by the summer of 2022, Head and Nung had negotiated a deal to take over the lease entirely. The couple currently runs Mumm alongside the wine bar, and Head has spent the past two years opening Fe, a Vietnamese coffee and banh mi shop with an in-house bakery, on the same block.
“Mam” is produced by Loveboat, a company co-founded by Nicolas Winding Refn, Greg Panteix and Fred Fiore. The script was co-written by Fakes and producer Marine Garnier, who have been collaborators for over 15 years. Edited by Sophie Fauldrinoy and Ludovic Tarnet, music by Grégoire Mousso. The film won the Culinary Cinema Award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival and was screened at the Cork International Film Festival ahead of its SXSW debut.
“This movie is about tolerance, hope, friendship, and building family,” Fakes says. “We are stronger when we are united, and today that message feels truer and more important than ever.”
Watch the clip here:
