In 2015, David Raymond was visiting Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and came upon an octogenarian at the city’s main post office, a beautiful colonial building designed by Gustave Eiffel. The old gentleman was frail and sitting at a public desk with a paper sign reading ‘Public Letter Writer’. He was constantly surrounded by admirers and clients seeking his help translating letters into French, English, and Vietnamese. He also had an air of humility, honor, and diligence about him. David knew little about him, but knew that he just had to make a film about Duong Van Ngo and tell his story. Through some research, David discovered that Mr. Ngo had been working for the post office for over 70 years, with most of those spent as an official letter writer, whose job it was to assist the illiterate and help them to liaise, whether that be banal legal papers or bridging family feuds. During the American War years, Ngo’s work had apparently even helped to bring individuals together, connecting lovers who didn’t share the same language. He was a civil servant, but also a Cyrano de Bergerac of sorts.

Due to technology, the need for public letter writers became more scarce, and thus, for the last 30 years, Mr. Ngo has represented the last letter writer still working in the entire Vietnamese post office system. He had already retired 20 years ago but quickly decided to come back on a volunteer basis to his old desk at the post office. It was all he ever knew, and it brought him joy.

Subsequently, David enlisted the collaboration of Trong Gia Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American artist who moved to Ho Chi Minh City in April 2015. The two had collaborated previously on a documentary art project about Trong’s family, titled DONG. Working with local Vietnamese producers and cinematographers, the group began pre-production and filming in summer of 2015.

The intent was to document the daily life and work of Mr. Ngo and supplementing it with interviews from relatives, co-workers, and people on the street around the Ho Chi Minh City post office. Through this process, we had hoped to pay homage to this man’s amazing life and in the grander picture, connect the lost art of letter writing in contrast to contemporary modes of communication – email, emojis, SMS, and so on. Is one any better than the other? Where do they intersect and what are the shortcomings, and how have these affected our daily lives? Is technology serving us for the better or worse?

A civil servant his whole life, Mr. Ngo’s honorable attitude and diligence toward his work showed through brightly in the captured material. However, we also unexpectedly discovered, rather bluntly, that the man we read about in the media – a romantic of sorts who connected people – was quite different from the real personage we interviewed. Mr. Ngo was kind and honest, but completely missing the romantic side we had hoped to capture. He was very matter-of-fact in discussing his job, indicating that it was merely his duty in service of the government, and nothing more. Romanticism, for him, was nonexistent.

We couldn’t believe it.

Nevertheless, we had to come up with a Plan B. With both having extensive knowledge about Surrealist art, that movement from the 1930s that emphasized the absurdities and dream nature of existence, we decided to expand the story of Mr. Ngo into another realm of narrative reality. Whether it was because he was elderly or forgetful minded, or just unwilling to reveal any more of himself on film, we were convinced that the romantic Ngo we had read about existed somewhere, and we were persistent in drawing this out in The Last Letter Writer.

But we were not going to do this in the conventional way. We decided to hire four additional actors of varying age: 17, 25, 42, and 58 years old, respectively. These four would play different versions of Mr. Ngo, all wearing the same white collared shirt and dark pants and working the translation desk at the post office. The film would take place over the course of one day, as each Ngo went through his routines and daily encounters, from praying at the local temple, getting a haircut, to an unusual encounter with a customer within the reveries of a midday nap.

Amplifying the realities of feeling lost in translation, several actors (and one of the directors) are "Overseas Vietnamese" whose command of the language is at best unnatural. Rather than mask these shortcomings, the choice was made to utilize them as strengths of speech, of the awkwardness that comes with trying to say something and not sound stupid, ie "failing up".

The poet and romantic Mr. Ngo was going to reveal himself in our eccentric mode of storytelling, inspired by French "New Wave" films, which goes against the grain of traditional Vietnamese documentaries that tend to arrow straight to literalness.

Little did we realize that as time went on, the subject and content would become all the more relevant.