Chinh Tran

I’ll be working on a novella called ‘To The Moon’ during the residency. It takes place in an imagined near future where Moon travel has been commercialised. The Moon has a nice symbolism–it’s forever been the subject of human imagination. Ancient people looked at the Moon and saw human faces or rabbits, and began to craft stories around those figures. The Moon has a strange, magnetic manipulation on us, who are drunk on our obsession to race into space and who forget that those stories originated on Earth, from our boundless imagination. Everyone takes Earth for granted – yet our planet contains its own universe.

‘To The Moon’ is based on a short film project I’m currently developing in tandem with the novella. It questions the idea of the promised land and uses sci-fi simply as a vessel to convey real-world problems. I hope to explore themes such as immigration, sense of belonging, identity, and love and intimacy in the age of interplanetary travel. During the residency, I expect to work on the story’s plot and worldbuilding, but above all, to have the time and space to think, explore, and become intimate (for lack of a better word) with my characters as they are the ground on which everything else rests upon.

Chinh Tran is a Vietnamese writer who’s currently based in Amsterdam. She has written several projects that were selected for short film festivals & development schemes in Europe and currently working on her first short film as a director. She is also interested in exploring cross-media storytelling using text, photos, sound, and video.