Seminar and Film Screening with Filmmaker Nguyen Trinh Thi in London

Hanoi’s filmmaker Nguyen Trinh Thi will hold a seminar on non-fiction filmmaking, followed by a screening of three of her films – ‘Jo Ha Kyu’, ‘Song to the Front’, and ‘Letters from Panduranga (In Smoke and Clouds)’ – on March 10, 2016 at Goldsmiths University of London.

In the seminar Nguyen Trinh Thi will introduce her works and film practice using clips from works. The seminar will cover topics of experimentation in non-fiction filmmaking including the use of found footage, performance, and diary and essay formats.

An hour after the seminar, audience will have the chance to watch three of Nguyen Trinh Thi’s films: Jo Ha Kyu (2012), Song to the Front (2011), and Letters from Panduranga (In Smoke and Clouds) (2015).

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, ‘Jo Ha Kyu’ 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 ra tran (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)’ is an essay film, made in the form of an anonymous exchange of letters between a man and a woman. It 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. The film has won in the category of Best Emerging Artist Using Digital/Video of the 2016 Prudential Eye Awards.

SCHEDULE:
10 Mar 2016
2:00pm – 4:00pm: Seminar, Room 274, Richard Hoggart Building
5:00pm – 7:00pm: Film screening, Room 309, Richard Hoggart Building

Nguyen Trinh Thi is an independent filmmaker and video/media artist from Hanoi. Her diverse practice has consistently investigated the role of memory in the necessary unveiling of hidden, displaced or misinterpreted histories; and examined the position of artists in the Vietnamese society. She is the founder and director of Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent center for documentary film and the moving image art in Hanoi since 2009.