LETTER FROM HANOI
Something is happening in Vietnamese cinema. The Camera d’or obtained in May at 76e Cannes Film Festival by The Golden Butterfly Treethe director’s first film Pham Thien An – three hours of sound and visual immersion in long sequence shots in remote Vietnam – confirms this. In 2022, glorious ashesby a more experienced filmmaker, Bui Thac Chuyên, won the Montgolfier d’or at the Festival des 3 continents, in Nantes.
At least one other first film, Tasteby director Lê Bao, special jury prize in the Encounters section at the Berlin Film Festival 2021, had already stood out for the audacity of his subject – an African footballer ejected from his team who shares the lives of four middle-aged women in a slum of ‘Ho Chi Minh City.
Unlike the first two, Taste has not received clearance for distribution in Vietnam. These films have most often been co-financed by regional funds such as that of the Singapore Film Commission, or even that of Purin Pictures, a private Thai foundation devoted to independent cinema in Southeast Asia – as well as with French schemes such as Aide aux Cinémas du Monde and the Normandie Images fund.
This creative effervescence is inseparable from another unprecedented phenomenon: the boom in commercial cinema.. “In ten years, or even before, because young people learn faster today, Vietnamese cinema will be at the level of South Korean cinema”told us in April Quan Nguyen, boss of an independent production company in Ho Chi Minh City, Production Q, on the set of the new horror feature film he is producing with director Tran Huu Tan, his partner on three previous films.
quest for authenticity
The film crew, who also came from Ho Chi Minh City, a day’s journey by plane and bus, camped for more than a month in an isolated village in the mountains of Hà Giang province, in the northern Vietnam, accessible only by two-wheeler.
The film’s costumes are inspired by indigenous ethnic minorities without reproducing them – so as not to be accused of stigmatizing them. Finally, it was necessary to negotiate with a finicky communist censorship. The same team is shooting, with a different cast, a series in twelve episodes for streaming and, in the form of a prequel, a hundred-minute feature film which will be released in theaters.
This quest for authenticity is paying off: in 2022, the pair’s previous project, A Vietnamese Horror Story, which depicts old legends of Saigon (the former name of Ho Chi Minh City) from the 1950s, has become the most viewed horror film in Vietnamese cinema. “I want to produce films rooted in local culture”, explains Quan Nguyen. The success ofA Vietnamese Horror Story pushed Netflix to buy the rights and broadcast it in eighteen countries. And convinced the Canal+ subsidiary in Vietnam to finance the series resulting from the new opus.
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