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Ghost stories close to home

Catherine Văn-Davies has good reason to hope her mother likes Hungry Ghosts on SBS.

While she was filming Hungry Ghosts actor Catherine Văn-Davies would often check the pronunciation of some of the dialogue by calling her mother.

Catherine, who stars as May Le, regrets she never quite mastered her ancestral language.

“I’m not conversational and, that’s part of growing up in Brisbane. It felt really ‘uncool’ to be Vietnamese, which now as an adult I feel so sad about. I’ve been going to classes for years trying to learn my mother’s language,” she tells TV Tonight.

“She told me stories about the war”

“I feel the loss of the language even though it wasn’t taken from me in a way that other people had their language removed. Going to Vietnam with my mum was amazing because I got to understand her as a young person. She told me stories about the war that I know that she wouldn’t have previously. But then also (seeing) her outside the context of that. Imagine that if next layer is I could speak to her language.”

Hungry Ghosts, produced by Matchbox Pictures, centres around spiritual stories of the Vietnamese community and explores the inherent trauma passed down from one generation to the next. Văn-Davies (Going Down), stars in her biggest TV role yet, as a young woman who must rediscover her true heritage and accept her destiny to help bring balance to a community still traumatised by the Vietnam war.

“She’s the unassuming hero, essentially”

“She’s the unassuming hero, essentially. When we meet her she’s lost her partner, she’s lost her business. She’s a very self-made woman, so losing these things is a big part of losing her identity, essentially.

“She’s thrust into this situation where she has to step up and is loaded with immense responsibility. So it’s kind of a late coming of age story, in a way.

“My mum came over during the Vietnam War. There’s a lot of parallels for a lot of the Asian-Australian cast members, particularly the Vietnamese ones. While they are fictional stories, we don’t have to reach too far into our personal history to connect with it.”

Produced by Matchbox Pictures the series has one of the most diverse casts ever featured in an Australian drama series, with more than 30 Asian-Australian actors and 325 Asian-Australian extras -some have first-hand memories of war.

“There’s an extraordinary Asian Australian contingent of actors in this show”

“There’s an extraordinary Asian Australian contingent of actors in this show. We’ve got young Vietnamese kids right up to our most senior Vietnamese actor, Gabrielle Chan,” she continues.

“A large percentage of the cast have stories. They are personal stories, so they’re not for me to divulge.

“It’s an extreme act of generosity, I think, on behalf of those performers to bring that much of their personal history to it. The real life stories are way more intense than those that are fictionalised.”

The cast also includes Jillian Nguyen, Ryan Corr, Bryan Brown, Clare Bowen, Ferdinand Hoang, Suzy Wrong, Gareth Yuen, Justine Clarke, Oakley Kwon, Lap Phan, Haiha Le, Susie Porter, Gary Sweet  and Hazem Shammas.

Written by Timothy Hobart, Michele Lee, Alan Nguyen, Jeremy Nguyen, John Ridley and directed by Shawn Seet, Hungry Ghosts is naturally also imbued with supernatural elements.

“In Asian cultures, the ghost story is taken very seriously, but I think it’s worth taking seriously,” says Văn-Davies.

“Shawn was very particular about not making it gimmicky… that it actually honoured the reverence in Asian culture. Shawn is also Asian-Australian, which I think helps a lot.

“But you could almost remove the ghosts from the story and see it’s just a story that people dealing with trauma. Which I think is absolutely universal.

“It also has humour, which I think we need to express more.. there’s quite a bit of incidental comedy.”

“I believe in the integrity of this project”

Central to her concerns is striking the right tone, especially given the sensitivities around the war.

“I think there’s a natural nervousness around how the story is portrayed. I think that sometimes, trauma stories and war stories have, in the past, felt slightly exploitative.

“I believe in the integrity of this project. You’re seeing many generations of people and their personalities. We see them as human beings and not just as a plot or an event.”

Hungry Ghosts airs 9:30pm Monday – Thursday on SBS.

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