Young Vietnamese director Truong Minh Quy made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival with his Un Certain Regard film “Viet and Nam,” which debuted on Wednesday.
His story, a contemporary-ish romance between two young miners, traces the memories and dreams of a nation. It is sensuous, atmospheric, formal, but humane, and mixes moments of longueur with surprising jolts of humor and joy.
Truong Minh Quy spoke to PvNew about the film’s origins, his unusual choice of shooting on Super 16mm film stock, and of swallowing his pride (for now) and accepting that the film cannot be shown in his native Vietnam.
What are the origins of this, your third, film? And how long did it take to come to fruition?
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I checked, it started in January of 2020. Just a few months after I moved to France to study. And right after I finished my feature documentary, ‘The Treehouse.’
I’d been friends with [Epicmedia producers] Bianca Balbuena and Bradley Liew for 20 years already and this seemed a good time for us to start working together.
Actually, I consider this project to be quite lucky because were able to move so fast. It took only four and a bit years. Normally [Asian independent films] take four to six years.
Sometimes a project can take a lot of time because of money. But ours moved fast because firstly, the quality of the project and the script, but also because all these producers really believed in it.
Was it a finished script when you showed it to Epicmedia?
It was rough treatment. And in my mind it was an emotional and artistic response to two different stories and events that happen in Vietnam, told through the lens of a fiction film. The film is quite ambitious in terms of narrative, because it tries to connect different stories, different timelines and time periods.
It tries to tell a story in a very personal and emotional way, not about the country, but about what an artist sees of the country.
What are those two events?
Many people will assume that one of those events is the 29 people killed in a container. That is not true. It is not about that. It is more abstract and complex than that.
I’ve always been interested in the landscape of the country, which is so beautiful, has so many layers and colors. This time I wanted to venture into a very new landscape, that of the coal mining industry.
Through that, we get this visual and poetic meaning of going deep inside the earth. I took this idea of going deep to search for coal as a metaphor for searching deep in our memory, in our history. And expanded it from there.
And there is a gay story, because obviously I’m gay. I think it’s natural to have these two young men together.
The foundation of the story is a feeling of somebody about being at home and yet being homeless. I use practical and concrete events to unfold this feeling, but the whole theme is based on that nostalgic idea.
Why did you shoot on 16mm stock?
I shot my documentary feature ‘The Treehouse’ on 16mm, then I shot another short film in France, also on 16mm. In fact, this is my fourth film on Super 16mm and with the same DP.
I didn’t choose the medium to fit the look I wanted to achieve. You can achieve the same look with digital these days. But, back in 2017, I’d never shot on film and then I chose to do so out of curiosity. To shoot on film was like a dream for a young filmmaker.
On ‘The Treehouse’ I had the opportunity, a very small crew and an adventurous mind. The result was good. So, to continue the same way on ‘Viet and Nam’ was a natural choice.
Also, as I wanted the look to convey a timeless feeling. Both the location and the use of 16mm give a sense of timelessness. If you hadn’t read anything about it beforehand and you walked into a cinema to watch this film, you might thing that it was made 20 years ago.
It was not a choice driven by poverty or other restricted circumstances?
I don’t think my producers had worked with 16mm film stock before and had the habit of sending materials backwards and forwards from the set. If I work with them again, I’m not even sure they’d agree to it next time.
Are the gay themes an obstacle that might prevent the film being screened in Vietnam?
The film is officially banned in Vietnam. But I don’t think the gay elements are the issue.
I have not clearly been told that the gay things are a problem. In fact, we can see some commercial films with gay stories have been released. So, I speculate that is not the problem.
Rather, I’m told that the image of the country and the people portrayed in the film are dark and negative. This is what I’m not allowed to do. And, so, we ended up agreeing that, if this is [the censors’] perspective, there is no point in my trying to cut this or that.
I regret that they chose to view the film with this perspective. It is different from mine and different from what I want the audience to see. It is a personal and emotional response to different events in the country. Some happy and sad, others joyful or tragic.
It is in my heart as a young filmmaker to offer this story to the Vietnamese audience. Well, the film is being seen differently now. But I hope that someday in the future this film can bring us all together. I don’t want to labor this point and make things more of a mess.
It means that you will miss out on being part of the fastest-growing box office markets in Asia.
Maybe. My perspective is that this is a generational thing. I don’t blame the Cinema Department or institutions like that [for the problems of censorship]. And I don’t speak in terms of independent or commercial cinema. I see all films as personal. People striving to make something artistic. And in this we are all still quite lonely.
What are you working on next?
So, I have two ideas, which I would like to develop at the same time. Let’s see which one can come to fruition first.
In one, the story follows one day in the life of a young student in the big city in Vietnam, his many different encounters. This will have the vibe of a Dostoyevsky novel.
The second one is bigger and might take a bit more time because the location is in the middle of the ocean. It is a father and son story about a king on an island.
The film is structured as an eight-country co-production, headed by Bradley Liew and Bianca Balbuena at Epicmedia, with co-producers including Marie Dubas (Deuxième Ligne Films, France), Lai Weijie (E&W Films, Singapore), Lorna Tee and Joost de Vries (An Original Picture, Netherlands), Stefano Centini (Volos Films Italia, Italy), Christian Jilka (Scarlet Visions, Germany), Nguyen Thi Xuan Trang (Lagi Limited, Vietnam) with Alex Lo (Cinema Inutile, U.S.) as executive producer. Sales are handled by France’s Pyramide International.
