With four awards and eight festival selections across just two short films, writer-director Annie Liones Nguyen is building significant momentum on the festival circuit, earning recognition for work that combines psychological depth, emotional precision, and a perspective shaped across Vietnam, Singapore, and Los Angeles.
At the center of that momentum are The Victim and Aquaphobia, two dramatically different films that showcase Nguyen’s range as a writer-director and her ability to move confidently between intimate personal storytelling and darker, morally complex narratives.
Written and directed by Nguyen, The Victim explores bullying, revenge, power, and the increasingly blurred line between victim and aggressor. The psychological short follows Elsie, a young woman pushed to the edge after becoming the subject of a viral bullying video. Rather than offering audiences an easy moral conclusion, Nguyen uses the film to examine how quickly perceptions of guilt, justice, and empathy can shift.
Nguyen maintained extensive creative control over the production, writing and rewriting the screenplay, developing its visual direction with cinematographer Davide Picci, scouting locations, and personally assembling its ensemble cast. For Nguyen, the strength of the project depended not only on the script, but on creating a cohesive group of performers capable of sustaining the film’s shifting power dynamics.
The film went on to win Best Student Film at the California Women’s Film Festival, where its impact extended beyond the award itself. Following a screening, an actress of Asian descent approached Nguyen and thanked her for bringing someone who looked like her to the screen. The interaction reinforced Nguyen’s commitment to portraying Asian characters as complex, multidimensional people and expanded her ambitions for The Victim, which she hopes to develop into a feature film or series.
Her other recognized short, Aquaphobia, reveals an entirely different dimension of her work.
Inspired by Nguyen’s mother, who survived being swept down a river as a child and lived with a fear of water for decades, the film transforms a deeply personal family history into a story about fear, trauma, and the courage required to confront both. Nguyen wrote the film in part as a tribute to her mother, who ultimately learned how to swim more than four decades after the childhood incident.
Nguyen created Aquaphobia during the 50 Hours Filmmaking Challenge at Indian Film Project, where filmmakers were tasked with conceiving and completing a film under an intense deadline. She entered the mobile category with no traditional production budget and had just 50 hours to write, shoot, and edit the project.
Those limitations became part of the film’s creative identity. Without professional sound equipment, Nguyen turned Aquaphobia into a silent film, relying on visual composition and performance to carry the story. She worked with friends as cast and crew, planned technically challenging shots under severe time constraints, and used a secondhand phone as the primary camera.
The experience helped shape a philosophy that continues to define her approach to directing: filmmaking is as much about resourcefulness and problem-solving as it is about artistic vision. Nguyen has said that limited resources often force filmmakers to find more inventive solutions, a lesson she continues to carry onto increasingly ambitious sets.
That versatility is becoming a defining feature of Nguyen’s body of work. Her projects move across comedy, psychological tension, romance, fear, bullying, and revenge, but remain connected by an interest in character and emotional conflict. Rather than establishing herself within one narrow genre, Nguyen has expressed a desire to develop a recognizable voice while continuing to experiment with tone, scale, and storytelling form.
Before entering filmmaking, Nguyen had already established herself creatively as an internationally published and award-winning poet. That literary background continues to influence the way she approaches character, imagery, rhythm, and emotional subtext on screen.
Her career has also begun expanding beyond short-form filmmaking. Nguyen recently wrote and directed the approximately 80-minute feature film While We Were Inside, marking her most ambitious production to date and another step in her progression from emerging short-film director to filmmaker working across larger formats.
Born in Hanoi, raised largely in Singapore, and now working in Los Angeles, Nguyen brings an inherently cross-cultural perspective to her filmmaking. Growing up across different languages and cultural environments has shaped the way she sees character and human behavior, while Los Angeles has exposed her to a global community of filmmakers pursuing their craft across vastly different backgrounds and circumstances.
For Nguyen, that international perspective is not simply part of her biography. It has become part of her creative identity and her ambition to build stories capable of connecting with audiences across cultures.
With four awards, eight festival selections, an expanding body of work, and her first feature already completed, Nguyen is steadily building a career defined by range, authorship, and creative ambition.
At the center of that trajectory remains a deceptively simple goal: to make films about people that feel real.
Whether she is exploring trauma, fear, romance, or moral ambiguity, Nguyen remains drawn to ordinary individuals facing complicated emotions and circumstances. As her projects grow in scale, her focus remains on creating characters audiences can recognize, understand, and perhaps even see themselves reflected in.
