Hungry Ghosts

BACKGROUND Hungry Ghosts is a television miniseries co-written by the researcher. It was broadcast on SBS TV. Traditional Vietnamese concepts about spirituality and the afterlife differ from Western ones. These beliefs inform practices in the everyday lives of Vietnamese-Australians. Thus, a show involving ghosts in a contemporary Vietnamese-Australian context requires exploring unfamiliar themes and forms in scriptwriting. The Vietnamese-Australian diaspora has been depicted in film & TV such as Romper Stomper (1992), Once Upon a Time in Cabramatta (2012) and Better Man (2013). To date, little of this work has used traditional Vietnamese beliefs about the afterlife to explore themes of intergenerational trauma. The research asks: How can elements of supernatural drama and traditional Vietnamese concepts of spirituality and the afterlife be used to explore themes of intergenerational trauma? What form might this take in contemporary Australian TV drama scriptwriting? CONTRIBUTION Hungry Ghosts is a fiction miniseries focused on generations of families, many of whom are Vietnamese-Australian. The concept of ghosts (as conceptualised in traditional Vietnamese beliefs) served as a metaphor for the influence of past events on the lives of people in the present. A central theme was intergenerational trauma. The process of scriptwriting drew on personal family history, interviews, autoethnographic research, hands-on experimentation, and insights gleaned from the study of previous film & TV works. SIGNIFICANCE Hungry Ghosts broadens the range of possibilities for depicting migrant communities in Australian TV, by drawing upon traditional spiritual beliefs of a migrant group to explore the effects of past traumas on contemporary migrants. Hungry Ghosts has been nominated for an Australian Writers’ Guild award for best Telemovie or Miniseries (2020).