ASH MAYFAIR: SKIN OF YOUTH (2025) New York Asian Film Festival 2025

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A Vietnamese trans love story that's like gorgeous and sexy music video

NYU-trained Vietnamese filmmaker Ash Mayfair got a rave review for her debut The Third Wrfe from Variety's Jessica Kiang. It was a depiction of 19th-century arranged marriage in Vietnam that was both chilling and lush. With her sophomore film Mayfair has turned to the hazards of trans, focused on a young couple in Saigon and their fraught love. She is San, who works an escort for rich men she hopes will finance her sex change surgery. He is Nam, a frisky underground cage fighter with a tendence to violent anger.

Set in Saigon in 1998, this is a gloriously sensuous and impressionistic explosion of image and sound that comes off sometimes as more a surreal fable than naturalistic storytelling. And then at times, especially at the end, it descends into humble but still sensual realism.

Nam is very sexy. San is girlish and pretty. When Nan tell her she is already a woman to hhim, we understand. In fact it is hard to believe that that body isn't a woman's, of if originally not, came about without extensive surgery (questions about casting?). When she comes back after being told to take a couple years and prove her stability before surgery, she dropes more than ever into a depression. nam is loyal and loving, but he has energy to burn, and so when his resorting to a prostitute named Mimi leades to her pregnancy, they become more and more a threesome. Gradually San comes to accept and even be a soulmate for Mimi.

Another party is granny, who accepts San but wants "babbies to play with" and so accepts both San and Mimi too. Granny sells banh cuon (Steamed Rice Rolls) in a street food stall and doesn't want to stop despite Nam's desire to set her up in a better house.

This idylic picture has a big, big bump when Nam, who also firts with the same cigar-chomping rich man as San, in his case to be sposored as a fighter, accidentally fights someone who tries to rob them and causes a young man's death. He goes to jail for this and then on trial, but Mayfair loves here characters and will not harm them.

I was turned on and sensually gratified by this film without being completely convinced by it.

A graduate page of Tisch tells us that Ash Mayfair was born in Vietnam and educated in the UK and the US beore her studies at at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, of which recent quadruple Oscar-winner Sean Baker is the most notable graduate today. Her critically acclaimed first feature The Third Wife (a 2015 Purple List selection) garnered nineteen awards, screened at over seventy international film festivals, and wqs distributed in thirty countries. Mayfair’s followup drama Skin of Youth has a raft of awards, won a Special Mention at Talents Tokyo, the Open SEA Fund Award at SE Asia Fiction Film Lab, and the Sorfond Award at the Busan Asian Film Market. The project was presented at the Berlinale European Co-Production Market in 2020 and is shortlisted for the Cannes women directors initiative ‘Breaking Through The Lens.’

The Tich pagre quotes Ash Mayfield: "In the nineties, Communist Vietnam opened up when the U.S. lifted the trade embargo on the country. Overnight Saigon changed into an exciting new world where films, fashion, money, and music poured in from the West bringing with them the promises of sexual and personal liberation. Vietnamese youths like myself were able to see examples of freedom everywhere, and yet we were not allowed to embrace and live it in our own reality.' says Mayfair.

ayfair is a young filmmaker of obvious gifts, who paints on the screen with flowing colors. Recently I belatedly watched at a friend's urging Thien An Pham/s 2024 Cannes Directors' Fortnight Caméra d'Or winner Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell and was deeply impressed as its deep dive into Vietnamese life, city and country, and its hypnotic, spiritual use of slow cinema style and Bi Gan-style long takes. That I feel is on another livel and it will be hard for any other young Vietnamese director to equal it; but Ash Mayfair is obviously an artist to watch and I need to see The Third Wife.

Skin of Youth, 122 mins., was released theatrically in Japan Mar. 21, 2025. It was screened for this review premiering in North America as part of the Jul. 11-17 New York Asian Film Festival. Showtimes:

Thursday July 24, 8:45pm
Film at Lincoln Center
2025 NYAFF Uncaged Award Nominee. Intro and Q&A with director Ash Mayfair. Feature preceded by short film: Colors Of The Sky's End

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.