Film Screening “Song to the Front” and “Vietnam the Movie” by Nguyen Trinh Thi

Sat 09 May 2015, 6 pm
Nha San Collective

From Nha San Collective:

You are invited to the screening of “Song to the Front” and “Vietnam the Movie” by Nguyen Trinh Thi.

2010 saw my first found footage film, Song to the Front, re-edited from the 1973 titular feature production by the Vietnam Feature Film Studio. The piece is also the first realized work in my pending project Vietnamese Classics Re-Cut Series.

The second film, Vietnam the Movie, is finished just a bit earlier this year. In this work, I ponder the definition of a nation and its place on the world map by watching how characters in movies and popular media had referred to Vietnam during the past 50 years.

Vietnam the Movie surveys how the word “Vietnam” appeared internationally (usually as a war, a symbol, an ideology, a concept), particularly in the context of the Vietnam War, and also the legacy of the Indochina War. It looks into the ways popular media forms our collective imaginations, memories, and understandings of a war, a country, a nation.

Along the side of Hollywood classics such as Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter, Forrest Gump, Full Metal Jacket, etc., the forty chosen sources that directly employ the word “Vietnam” also feature the lesser known or virtually forgotten works by Harun Farocki, Fassbinder, Herzog, Nagisa Oshima, and Ann Hui. In particular, the making of this film has granted me the opportunity to explore the political stance of Jean-Luc Godard whose films held the most mention of “Vietnam”, at least among those of the filmmakers surveyed.

My motivations in recycling found footage is to preserve, deconstruct, subvert different kinds of film and media’s aesthetics and language; to re-tell, re-think, re-read, re-engage with history.

Screening Duration: 70 m.
In English with Vietnamese subtitles.
After-screening discussion with the filmmaker

Please, support for our non profit art project by dominant 30k and choose your drinks !

This is within Hanoi DocLab’s bi-weekly “Creative Documentary Film Series” screening program. Let’s look forward also to the coming films in the program.

Communication partner: Hanoi Grapevine

Nhà Sàn COLLECTIVE is not a museum, a gallery or an international culture institute where completed work are presented by established artists. Just like Nhà Sàn Studio before, it is a working studio to nurture where artists can create, collaborate, be given advices, critiques, and have chances to meet with international artists, curators. Works that are presented at open studio every month could be finished or not, but the process of developing idea and working to improve the quality of the art work for local artists is what Nhà Sàn COLLECTIVE focus on.

If you are interest and curious about experimental art, and want to have conversation with the working artists, please visit

Nha San COLLECTIVE 2nd floor, 24 Ly Quoc Su, Hanoi Website: www.nhasanstudio.org Email: [email protected]