The short documentary is a striking depiction of what families avoid discussing, and what can happen when those taboos dissolve.

For a project in film school, Carol Nguyen set out to make a fictional short film about three generations of a family as they experience assimilation after immigration, but the process revealed a different story, one closer to home. Nguyen’s parents each moved at different times during the nineteen-eighties from Vietnam to Canada, where they met, got married, and raised two daughters, with Nguyen’s father’s parents as part of the household. To prepare to tell the invented story that she had originally conceived, Nguyen began to interview her parents and sister. She soon realized that asking them questions about their lives so directly produced an unprecedented openness. Although the events they described were familiar, she told me, “I had never heard them confess their emotions this way.” She decided to reconceptualize the film as a kind of social experiment: she would interview each family member separately and then gather them at the dinner table to listen to excerpts from the interviews together.

The result is the short documentary “No Crying at the Dinner Table,” a striking depiction of what families avoid discussing, and what can happen when those taboos dissolve. Growing up, Nguyen said, she was regularly told not to cry at the dinner table—hence the film’s title—and felt discouraged from overtly expressing sadness. “I learned how to cry silently, so that I would never get caught,” she said. One memory stands out in particular: after her dog was hit by a car, she saw its body and was traumatized by the sight. It seemed to her that there was a finite period of time in which it was acceptable to grieve, even though she was affected by the event long after. Her parents had witnessed war and death in Vietnam, and, next to the gravity of those painful experiences, her own losses felt insignificant. Before she made “No Crying at the Dinner Table,” Nguyen had never heard the term “intergenerational trauma,” but when a film programmer used the phrase in a description of her documentary, it struck her as an apt expression for what she had been grappling with in her work.

The interviews give a kaleidoscopic image of the family members’ private pains, and expose patterns in their shared struggle to communicate. Nguyen’s mother recounts challenges similar to Nguyen’s in expressing emotion with her own parents. She and her mother, Nguyen’s grandmother, did not often hug, and she remembers the one time she gave her mother a kiss, when her mother was very ill. She never hugged or kissed her father. “In Vietnam, the way parents express their love to children isn’t through physical intimacy,” she says, adding that the lack becomes normal. “You get used to it.” Nguyen’s sister talks about her memories of their grandparents (their father’s parents, who lived with them): her sense of safety when spending time with them while their parents worked long hours, or running up to their room to watch movies with them when she didn’t want to do her homework, and the enduring grief that she has experienced since they died, when she was young. “But I guess you’re never really finished mourning anyways,” she says, “so I guess it’s not that big of a deal.”

The story that Nguyen’s father tells is especially heartbreaking: he was called upon to check on his brother in the midst of a mental-health crisis, and, after he left his brother’s apartment late at night, fifteen minutes before his wife was supposed to arrive, his brother killed himself. Nguyen knew that this had happened, but she had never heard her father express his anguished sense of responsibility before. “I’m only telling you because you asked. But I have never spoken openly about this,” he says. “Even to this day, I still feel guilty.” He says that he still sees his brother in his dreams. In shots in between their stories, we watch the family members go about small tasks—Nguyen’s mother soaks bok choy and prepares a whole mackerel for cooking, her father lights incense, and her sister soaks in a bath. These quiet moments evoke the way memories arise during moments of quotidian repetition, and the strangeness of mundane life continuing after tragedy.

Before shooting the scene in which her family sits together at the dinner table, Nguyen expected them to remain characteristically stoic as they listened to the recordings. She imagined that the film would be a commentary on how people can be at a loss when their loved ones’ inner lives are laid bare. Instead, as the scene unfolded, something happened that surprised her: her mother and sister began to cry, and her sister wrapped her arm around her mother. Nguyen had not anticipated that her approach would lead to the kind of unabashed display of affection that can change a family dynamic rather than merely document it. “I had to sit down with my editor and reëvaluate, you know, what is the story?” she said. In some ways, though, the film is a logical culmination of the creative work that she has been doing for years: she has been making videos since she was a teen-ager, and has often included her family in the process, casting them in her films. Through the extensive conversations she had with them to prepare them to speak about their experiences in front of a camera, a strong sense of trust was established. Her artistic process also seems to have strengthened their relationships off-camera: since they worked on this documentary, Nguyen said, for the first time, she and her family members have started regularly saying “I love you” to one another.