Friday, March 13 / 6:00 pm / Ottawa Art Gallery

Program: A Useful Ghost, followed by an audience discussion with
IFFO programmer Tish Black and guest
Carol Nguyen (Nantic, No Crying at the Dinner Table)

The Gaze program, created by IFFO programmer Tish Black, brings the audience into the screening experience to discuss films from underrepresented filmmakers. The film and thematic talk of each screening explore, with the audience, the personal and cultural significance of seeing on film people and perspectives different from our own.

For this year’s IFFO program, Tish invites filmmaker Carol Nguyen to discuss the featured film A Useful Ghost and how ghosts prompt us to question mortality and morality. The ghost of Nat possesses a vacuum to be with her husband again, but can they really pick up where they left off? Other ghosts linger, possessing objects and haunting dreams, because they believe their lives were cut short. Can ghosts find justice?

Whether they are haunting us, scaring us, or warning us, ghosts in film have so much more to say than Boo!

Centred around A Useful Ghost, Tish and Carol, along with the audience, will discuss the use of ghosts in storytelling, the morality of ghostbusting, and what haunts us.

Feature presentation \

Ghosts are not often useful. Possessing factory equipment, causing a family-owned factory to fail its inspection, is not at all helpful. But Nat, the recently deceased wife of March, wants to be a useful ghost. She possesses a vacuum cleaner from her husband’s family factory so that she can be with him again. Though his family doesn’t approve of her (they never did), the couple are happy to be reunited. Determined to be allowed to stay, Nat offers her ghostly services: she can get rid of the ghost haunting the factory. Earning herself a new place in society as a good ghost, she offers her ghostbusting services to others. But her new role confronts her morals: what is she willing to do to get the life (in death) that she dreamed of?

Merging genres and storylines, A Useful Ghost becomes more than the sum of its parts: a call for a vacuum repair becomes the linchpin of a film examining Thailand’s history of oppression and classism through humour and horror.

Winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes Critics’ Week 2025, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s feature debut was called “the most elegant human-vacuum romance you’ll ever watch” by IndieWire.

-Tish Black