Event overview
Films: Jo Ha Kyu (2012); Song to the Front (2011) and Letters from Panduranga (In Smoke and Clouds) (2015)
Nguyen Trinh Thi is a Hanoi-based independent filmmaker and video/media artist.
Film synopses:
'Jo Ha Kyu'. The essential concept of narrative structure in traditional Japanese temporal arts, jo-ha-kyû, is loosely interpreted against the filmmaker’s subjective experience of Tokyo shortly after the 2011 Japanese earthquake. In a way, the piece is about the conflict and co-existence of the concrete and abstract worlds, between objective observances and subjective experience, narrative and non-narrative, documentary and fiction.
'Song to the Front' takes a historical Vietnamese war film from 1973 as its central source. Re-editing ‘Bai ca rat ran (Song to the Front)’, produced by the Vietnam Feature Film Studio, the filmmaker turned the black and white classic feature into a small vignette that decomposes the aesthetic and romantic elements of this social-realist melodrama.
'Letters from Panduranga (In Smoke and Clouds)' The essay film, made in the form of an anonymous exchange of letters between a man and a woman, was initially inspired by the fact that the government of Vietnam plans to build the country’s first two nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuan (formerly known as Panduranga), right at the spiritual heart of the Cham indigenous people, threatening the survival of this ancient matriarchal Hindu culture that stretches back almost two thousand years.
At the border between documentary and fiction, the film shifts audience attention between foreground and background, between intimate portraits and distant landscapes, offering reflections around fieldwork, ethnography, art, and the role of the artist.
Intertwining circumstances of the past, present, and future, the film also unfolds a multi-faceted historical and on-going experience of colonialisms, and looks into the central ideas of power and ideology in our everyday.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 10 Mar 2016 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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