2019 Doc route: Vietnam Doc route: Vietnam
Vietnam has a relatively long cinematic history. Under French colonial rule, a film industry already existed, with the presence of Pathé in Saigon, but this remains anecdotal to the true genesis of Vietnamese cinema. Vietnam is still counted today among the rare communist countries in the world and the history of Vietnamese film really began under this regime. From the beginnings of the Vietnamese revolution, cinema took an extremely important place and, as in numerous liberation wars, it was used as a propaganda weapon.
In 1986, date of what is called the “Doi Moi”, the “renewal” in Vietnamese, (the equivalent of perestroika in the USSR), another cinema began to emerge, first with fiction film, still under the control of the Ministry of Propaganda, which set out to accomplish “in a more flexible way” what constitutes the fundamental base of Vietnamese film even today: recounting and questioning Vietnamese society in its complexity. These questionings were at once the source of the strength and the pain of Vietnamese cinema, caught between the desire to question its society and the difficulties of expressing a personal point of view. The individual expression of a point of view had difficulty finding its place first under the weight of an age-old, highly complex and powerful social organisation, then facing a context of contemporary economic upheaval in which the country was torn between socialism and an ultra-liberal market economy.
It was only at the beginning of the 2000s that various elements came together facilitating the emergence of documentary film in the form of direct cinema. The desire of a few young Vietnamese filmmakers, the arrival of foreign capital from institutions like the Ford Foundation as well as the opening of the country to greater cultural exchange led to the creation of three founding sites for documentary film, the TPD Movie Center, the Ateliers Varan and later DocLab, as well as SKDA, the Hanoi film school.
In the middle of the decade 2000, the return of members of the young generation from the Vietnamese diaspora and Vietnam’s joining the WTO in 2007 marked a turning point in the country. The 2010s saw the arrival of commercial cinema and the massive building of multiplexes throughout the country. With its one hundred million inhabitants and an emerging middle class who were discovering the pleasures of consumer society, commercial cinema dominated Vietnamese film production. Then in 2015, the country moved up from being classified a “developing country” to an “emerging country”, which considerably modified the resources available for film production, favouring the commercial film industry to the detriment of lower-budget, more artistic cinema. Arthouse cinema, essentially fictional, appeared at the end of the 2000s and was the first to be exported internationally through the selection of films in prestigious festivals. The majority of these films were coproduced by foreign production companies (French, American, German, Japanese, Korean, etc.).
Documentary film was left in the shadows of the Vietnamese production. It allowed young filmmakers (working as much in fiction as in documentary) to “kill the father” by breaking their ties with propaganda film and to try out other forms and styles. Nonetheless it remains on the margins to this day and its production is very difficult. A few public funds exist in Vietnam but are exclusively reserved to the few “propaganda” films still produced by the national studios.
Furthermore, documentary film is not considered profitable and can hope for no support from the current economic system, whereas it could rely, only a few years ago, on some financing from NGOs or international public organisms. The majority of documentary films are now self-produced, sometimes managing to earn support from patrons or exceptionally garnering post-production aid thanks to the support of foreign festivals (Pusan, etc.).
Although Vietnam is well known for its past and for the wars it suffered, it is perhaps insufficiently known today: the human riches of the country are still little-known. The orientation of documentary films produced these past ten years seems to mark a difference with those made by the previous generation, mobilised by war and ideology. Today, filmmakers approach the fundamental questions crossing Vietnamese society in a more intimate way, sometimes demonstrating a sense of irony that their predecessors could not risk. And although criticism remains difficult, badly received by the authorities, characters from reality come to the help of young directors, offering themselves generously up to the image: they show the complexity of life and lend a new depth to films.
The vast majority of documentary production was commissioned by the State and broadcast on television. It was formatted to fit a thirty-minute slot and all the films were accompanied by a voice over whose role was generally didactic, to the detriment of the richness of the soundtrack, obviously. This conformism was not only rejected by the public who loved documentary, but also disillusioned numerous talented directors and cinematographers of the State studios. The renewal of Vietnamese documentary coincided with the presence of the Ateliers Varan in Vietnam from 2004 to 2011. The former trainees, now independent filmmakers, have taken over and organise their own filmmaking workshops (the most recent one took place last July in Ho Chi Minh City). With the introduction of this form of direct cinema and particularly of direct sound, filmmakers have established another relationship to reality. A lot of spontaneity can be seen in these workshop films and the notion of play has become important. In this form of cinema, real characters can laugh, cry, be rude, perform so spontaneously and authentically that the censors, sensitive to whatever constitutes a symbol, seem completely disarmed, whereas the public, who identify completely, are enthusiastic. Hence Madam Phung’s Last Journey is as much a film on transgender individuals as it is on the desolation of the Vietnamese countryside, where corruption is directly shown and where the ideal of the police, “Uncle Ho’s soldiers”, is severely tarnished. The full film was presented to a very wide audience, without any cuts imposed by the censors. It remains today the most seen documentary film in the country. While on the subject, we can note that the film Finding Phong released for theatrical distribution in France in 2018 was granted a licence for audiences over twelve years of age, whereas in Vietnam it was considered suitable for all audiences. Since With or Without Me, the first feature-length documentary “made in Vietnam”, then with Madam Phung’s Last Journey, the first documentary released in cinemas in twenty years, filmmakers have become “producers” of documentary features, a format which remains very rare in global documentary production.
There are three approaches in this programme, which correspond to three ways of creating narratives to attempt to give an account of contemporary history: documentaries, fiction films and artist films. Documentary films are as close as possible to people. In a form of direct cinema, they focus on a situation, a place, approach a family, a collective, an individual, and stories emerge. The fictions often rely on atmospheres, wanderings, and less on intrigues or scenarios, which are generally very tenuous or elliptical. A desire to express feelings through the choice of an actor or a style of direction can be sensed. And in a certain way, the artist films presented here create a link between documentary reality and imagined narratives. They are evidently seeking a form and manage to connect the focus on sensation with a story or an idea. They are freer and more hybrid in their form. But beyond these different formal approaches, Vietnamese films reveal how difficult it is to reconstruct oneself as an individual in a collective society where each personal thought or word is still strictly controlled, as much politically as socially. The expression of an individuality in the face of the collective remains delicate. That is why the expression of opinions in these stories often relies on more liberating fictional elements.
Tran Phuong Thao, Arnaud Soulier, Christophe Postic
In the presence of the programmers.
With support from the Institut français du Vietnam and our thanks to Frédéric Alliod.
Special thanks to all the directors and producers of the films in the programme.