Truong Minh Quy, a young 34-year-old Vietnamese filmmaker whose third feature film, Vietnam and Namis selected in the Un certain regard section of the 77e edition of the Cannes Film Festival, wondered if censorship in his country would ban the first Vietnamese film in the official selection. The answer came on May 4: “The title and content of the film, its ideology and theme show a dark, hopeless and negative vision of the Vietnamese country and people”ruled the film department of the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Sports of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to justify a decision banning the distribution of the film “in Vietnam and abroad”. Vietnam and Nam was not, however, withdrawn from the Festival by its producers: he will have nationality “official” of the Philippines. It will be screened on May 22 in Cannes.
Viet’s homosexuality and Nam, the two characters – employed in a coal mine –, from the film by Truong Minh Quy, do not seem to have motivated the banning of the film. It is no longer taboo in Vietnam in many commercial films or series: “The association of homosexuality with the profession of miner could pose a problem”, however, explained the director we met in Ho Chi Minh City in April. The censors reason, he continues, based on the symbolic significance of the images: “There’s a war veteran in the film, but he’s going to confess to a crime. A family uses a medium to find the remains of a missing soldier. Soldiers accompany them, but they are not supposed to believe in these practices. »
The Vietnamese communist regime does not joke with Marxist-Leninist precepts – working class, atheism, etc. – especially in a period of increased openness to the West. The title is another ideological crime by association: it plays with the country’s sacrosanct name. “With the other filmmakers of my generation, we want to make films that have meaning. And we feel a duty to talk about the storycontinues the filmmaker. But we also want to experiment, to be in abstraction. This creates tension. »
Shot in 16mm, Vietnam and Nam brings out the emotion of sensual and minimalist scenes in the cocoon of the bowels of the earth. It’s a love story, but the characters evolve in the social and family realities of Vietnam in 2001, the year in which the action takes place.
Unhealed wounds
Long haired, a little rebellious, the director slammed the door of a film school in Vietnam in 2008 to make short films thanks to which he was accepted at the French training school Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing (North) in 2019. His penultimate feature film, Tree House, never shown to the censor but screened at the Locarno Festival in Switzerland in 2019, already explored a sensitive subject: otherness, the “negative” embodied by the minority ethnic groups of the central highlands, the region from which it originates, in current Vietnam and its recent history – they have often been confined, sometimes persecuted. The film is in the form of a documentary, told in 2035, from the planet Mars.
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