KVT – With or Without me
KVT is glad it was with him in the Doclab audience
Doclab is really proving to be a powerful part of Hanoi’s cultural world.
On Saturday night they hosted a really excellent, and memorable documentary by young Vietnamese film maker Phuong Thao Tran and her French partner Swann Dubus. Titled ‘With or Without Me’, this little beauty with its themes of heroin addiction, HIV aids, the impact on women and families and all set in the northern town of Dien Bien Phu was awarded a prize at the 2011 FIDmarseille, the Marseille International Documentary Festival, which has a very rigorous selection procedure (please see comment below), and notably the Torino Film Festival in Italy where, in the Documentary Section it was in the final eleven in extremely high class company that included as Martin Scorceses’ ‘George Harrison: Living In The Material World’ which got a BAFTA award this year.
The documentary was a co-production of the Medical Committee Netherlands Vietnam, funded by the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Hanoi and with cooperation from the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), all of whom must be over the top with the end result. It took 6 months for Tran and Dubus to film the piece under interesting conditions as we found out at during the Q and A session after the screening….a Q and A which was direct, to the point and really informative and reflected the intelligent interest shown by the capacity, mainly young and mainly Vietnamese audience.
Set in fairly remote Dien Bien Phu, only 20 km from the Lao border it honestly, though with delicacy and empathy, investigates its themes using the unscripted words of two males, one from the Kinh majority group and one from the most dominant ethnic minority group. Although the documentary is an excellent portrait of these two heroin addicts, both HIV positive, for me, the most powerful aspect of a very powerful, if surprisingly intimate film was the manner in which it showed the suffering and resilience of the women who are in the unfortunate position of being married or related to male addicts. Similarly those women who are at the forefront of addiction counselling. It allowed all of these women a great dignity.
Should it come up again for screening then I thoroughly recommend it.
Congratulations to the film makers and a huge thanks to Doclab….and if you’re not on their mailing list then you should be.
| Kiem Van Tim is a keen observer of life in general and the Hanoi cultural scene in particular and offers some of these observations to the Grapevine. KVT insists that these observations and opinion pieces are not critical reviews. Please see our Comment Guidelines / Moderation Policy and add your thoughts in the comment field below. |
Can you please correct the information as:
“…was awarded with a prize at 2011 FIDLab, an international co-production platform for film projects in Marseille” instead of “…was awarded a prize at the 2011 FIDmarseille, the Marseille International Documentary Festival, which has a very rigorous selection procedure”.
Thank you very much!