Good morning, Vietnam

Worries over a nuclear thermal plant. Fears of a gay community. Climate change. Repressive marriages. A just-concluded film festival at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale could well have been dealing with issues that Indians have been grappling with. But the films — with their universal themes — had emerged out of Vietnam.

The first edition of Artists’ Cinema, a film programme running parallel to the Biennale, has been showcasing art cinema, documentaries and feature films curated by film-makers and scholars. The festival zeroed in on 163 films, put together by 12 curators and screened over 100 days. A selection of Vietnamese films — curated by academic Shweta Kishore — was screened from February 1-4 as part of Artists’ Cinema.

Kishore, a lecturer in film and media studies and media production at RMIT Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City, curated films with themes that relate to both India and Vietnam. “Among these were films that had to do with environment and climate change, ageing populations, sustainability and ecology,” says the scholar, whose interest lies in socially relevant documentaries and feminism.

Vietnam and India share not just cordial relations but a parallel history of colonialism and economic reforms. India’s political leadership has been sympathetic to Vietnam’s, and condemned the American war in the Southeast Asian nation. But while the films selected for the biennale dealt with common concerns, Kishore says they moved away from “the classic documentary that is about exposition, communicating information and giving facts to involving the audience to think about the film and its world”.

Documentaries across the world, she stresses, are moving away from linear narratives and merely recording facts. Instead, films have been drawing in the spectator, while blurring lines between reality and fiction. The ones that she curated for the festival reflect this trend.

The lineup included films such as Love Man Love Woman , Vietnam The Movie , My Father , The Last Communist and shorts such as Letters from Panduranga by Vietnamese artist Thi Nguyen, highlighting the essay-like quality of the narrative. Nguyen’s film captures two voices — that of a man and a woman — who, through an exchange of letters over a brief period, describe the spaces they inhabit currently and document the changes they are confronted with.

In a haze: In My Father, The Last Communist, filmmaker Doan Hong Le trains the arc lights on her father, battling Alzheimer’s

Ninh Thuan, once the province where the ancient Cham community lived, is soon going to be occupied by a nuclear thermal plant. A narrator describes the community, the people and their attire, food and their mixed (Islam and Shaivite) religious practices. But at the back of the mind of the narrator — and of the audience as well — is the nuclear plant threatening the existence of the indigenous people with a 2,000-year-old matriarchal civilisation.

The exchange of letters between a man and woman on field work is at once a reflection of their inner thoughts and the outside world. Meanwhile, the narration explores the very process of documentation — on the fly, with the cooperation of the subject, in conversation, or distant from them. It also explores the context and the background in which their subject exists, and debate on whether the displacement of the people from their ancient land will sound the death knell for their culture as well.

Another film that rings a bell in India is Love Man Love Woman . The film follows members of the Dạo Mau cult in Vietnam, a variant of the State’s indigenous religion of Confucianism. The Dạo Mau followers worship the mother goddess in a series of rituals, and the most important part of their practice is when the goddess speaks through a medium, usually a man, who cross-dresses as a woman for the part.

No clear lines: Love Man Love Woman follows members of the Ðao Mâu cult in Vietnam

The Dạo Mau are homosexuals in a society that prohibits same-sex relationships. Through Master Luu Ngoc Duc, a prominent spirit medium in Hanoi, and his vibrant community, the film explores how effeminate and gay men in homophobic Vietnam have traditionally found support and expression in the Mother Goddess Religion.

Luu Ngoc Duc was once a professor, and an acquaintance underscores what the academic went through when he says, “He could have been called an excellent professor, or an upright soldier. But he chose to say, I’m half-man, half-woman.” The Dạo Mau cult is not without its prejudices against other gay men, and women, believing them to be inferior to the ones who are chosen for worship.

Referring to new trends in Vietnam, Kishore points out that many artists have been using film in mixed media performances and installations. “Lots of artists are increasingly using video in Vietnam in their installations, combined with other elements such as performance, text and spoken words and art. They are not wholly focussed on one medium. You find different materials and techniques, and marry them together,” she says.

She cites the example of an artist who wanted to focus on the repressive idea of marriage in Vietnam. Her own experience of marriage had been traumatic, and she wanted to portray that on film. Her piece is a 10-minute video in which she stands in her wedding dress. In traditional Vietnamese weddings, it is customary to eat a betel nut, the juice of which causes a reddish-orange stain. She stands in her white dress, with a plate of betel nuts. She keeps chewing till her mouth starts dripping its red juice, staining the dress.

“Betel nut is intoxicating, and terrible to eat. The agony is evident on her face. Pieces such as these combining video and performance are popular among contemporary artists,” Kishore says.

Unlike India, Vietnam has few platforms for film-makers. “There are no spaces such as the NFDC (National Film Development Corporation) or film societies or any vigorous film appreciation and criticism cultures,” Kishore says. Vietnamese film-makers have therefore emerged with unusual techniques that are an evidence of their isolated source of inspiration — watching films.

“While I won’t go as far as to say don’t go to a film school, like the director Werner Herzog once famously said, not going to film school works in different ways. You can find film-makers willing to take more chances, be idiosyncratic. Where there are challenges, they have a different approach to film language. When you learn through watching cinema, instead of studying it, it can develop a different language altogether for the film-maker,” she points out.

The films curated for Kochi reflect contemporary political and social contradictions in modern-day Vietnam. Some are a part of the economic liberalisation process and the art movement of the 1990s, and reflect the transitions that the Vietnamese have been facing. In My Father, The Last Communist , film-maker Doan Hong Le trains the arc lights on her father, battling Alzheimer’s. The film wonders if the ethos and ideology of the generation that fought against the French and the Americans will remain after the elders pass away.

Censorship is another issue that film-makers have to deal with. The concept of the family, for instance, cannot be criticised. “The family as a unit is very important to the Vietnamese. The women’s wing of the communist party, which fights for equal pay for women, spreads a lot of literature about the importance of a married life and progeny. Films that critique this concept of family are taboo in the country,” she says.

Kishore stresses that self-censorship is rife, since even before a film is produced its script needs to be approved by the censor board. “Anything that is seen as challenging or subversive will not get screened or produced. What is being screened is also limited. While a lot of Hollywood films such as those from the Marvel series make their way to Vietnam, the Hollywood material that gets into Vietnam is also heavily censored.”

Vietnam The Movie , directed by Nguyen Trinh Thi, stitches together clips of films where the Vietnam War has been dramatised to form its own narrative. The film-maker puts forth various perspectives on the war culled from cinema from across the world.

“Trinh Thi looks at how the Vietnam War has been represented in cinema, and through that representation how the event is recreated, how the story changes depending on one’s perspective. She recreates this whole world through cinema references. This is interesting because it shows you how representation works, and the power that exists within representation, as well as who has the power to represent who,” she says. The film looks largely at French and American cinema, but there are also references to two Korean and one Bengali film.

The film festival curated by Kishore gave the audience a glimpse of the current sociopolitical landscape of Vietnam, but also translated its philosophical and ethical conundrums, some of which are universal.

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