IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS

Diane Severin Nguyen’s film IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS (2021) restages revolutionary rhetoric through critical pop performance. Set in present-day Warsaw, the film follows protagonist Weronika Nguyen as she is absorbed into a K-pop group—a genre widely popular among Polish youth, harnessed by the artist to probe the historic relationship between Vietnam and Poland, two countries that have been sites of ideological warfare between the East and the West. Moving between music video, documentary fragments, and first-person narrative, amid rich yellow-and-red palettes and slick dance routines set against weighty war monuments, Nguyen considers the complicated, layered forms of propaganda that underpin identity, image, and cultural formation. 

Nguyen found the film’s teenage protagonist on Instagram, searching for combinations of common Polish names mixed with her own surname. The resulting Weronika stands in for the Northern Vietnamese diaspora that settled in Poland after the Vietnam War—a history central to the film. Young Weronika washes up on the shores of post-Communist Poland, and, upon hearing the thumping bass of a catchy pop song through her headphones, responds to the call, training in solitude in a foreign land, before finding purpose, and revolution, through her K-pop collective: “The blood pumping as one, as one, one, one. / If revolution is a sickness, I want to be sick, sick, sick.” The film utilizes K-pop as a guiding and shared symbolic language through which Eastern Europe and Asia’s entangled Cold War allegiances resurface, testament to the artist’s larger interest in how shared culture is woven together in new ways over time and in different places.

Throughout, spectacle is interlaced and often at odds with conflicting twentieth-century thought—voiceovers drawn from revolutionary clichés and radical writers including Ulrike Meinhof, Hannah Arendt, and Mao Zedong—often disjointed from the film’s visuals. The narration weighs multiple ideologies at once, without exposure or clarity, offering no clear moral or political resolution. Neither documentary nor fully staged, the film channels the familiar buoyancy and artifice of today’s internet trends. But beneath its glossy choreography and autotuned soundtrack, IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS reveals devastating undercurrents and sharp lyrics of displacement, loss, and belonging—“I swam from the ocean searching for a new nation / I lost my family that day”—historical and political trauma staged through teenage ambition and cathartic pop anthem.

Nguyen examines how political conviction is absorbed into the gestures, fashions, and trends through which contemporary identity is built and performed, especially in a time where self-actualization and recognition is so tied to image-making. Weronika’s status as an outsider within Poland—whose current government holds a restrictive stance toward immigration—reflects an unmistakable urgency of our globalized moment. At its core, the film asks: how is identity and self-actualization realized amid and against an opposing regime of representation?

Click here to learn more about the artist.

^{Generously on loan from the collection of François R. Roy.}