Nổ Cái Bùm | undercurrents
07 pm, Thurs, 24 Aug 2024
Cá Chuồn Space
East Sea Tourist Area, Thọ Quang, Sơn Trà, Đà Nẵng
From the organizer:
Across thousands of miles,
What kind of love is this?
Borrowing the color of lipstick
To repay a debt to Ô and Lý.
Pity that,
In the prime of youth,
Is it a troubled fate or a debt of love…
The people of central Vietnam still sing about the heartache of Princess Huyền Trân as she traveled to Champa to become queen, following a geopolitical marriage that exchanged the provinces of Ô and Lý—now the strip of land from Quảng Trị to Quảng Nam. Her story serves as a propelling impetus for this short film series, delving into the various currents of history that intermingle, clash, and permeate the abyss of the personal and collective psyche.
The short films by Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai, Sylvia Schedelbauer, Lêna Bùi, Bjorn Melhus, and Huỳnh Công Nhớ coalesce into convergences of images and sounds, meandering through absent histories, faith and loss, displacements and conflicts, obsession and emancipation. Each film forges its own distinct vortex of languages while simultaneously resonating in dialogue with one another. Together, they dissolve linear and over-represented temporalities, enabling possibilities for layered affiliations and empathy that reverberate across time and space.
Text by Nguyễn Đình Tôn-Nữ and Phạm Nguyễn Anh Tú.
Movie list:
1) Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai – Black Landscapes (2020)
This project builds on “Day by Day” (2014), exploring the migrant community along Cambodia’s Tonle Sap River. Facing historical traumas like war and genocide, these stateless immigrants live in poverty without proper documentation or legal security. Returning in 2016, I found many abandoned boat houses as families migrated to Vietnam due to dwindling water levels and pollution. “Black Landscapes” captures these deserted areas that alludes to fading memories and beliefs. Green light tubes, used for fishing, are placed where homes once stood, filmed alongside the prayers of a migrant shaman who now resides on shore.
2) Sylvia Schedelbauer – Oh, Butterfly! (2022)
A finger presses play on a tape recorder–Madama “Buttterfly” sings. The sea surges again–the U.S. naval officer Pinkerton travels across the Pacific to Nagasaki. Schedelbauer’s melancholy, ecstatically dramatic montage of Puccini’s opera heroine Cio-Cio-San and 60 of her interpreters, of picture postcard motifs, geisha portraits, film historical footage from Thomas Edison to David Cronenberg, and her familial fantasy and private mythology creates a film of sublimely physical texture. Condensate of her creative work. (Andreas Wilink, kultur.west)
3) Bjørn Melhus – Moon Over Da Nang (2017)
Towards the end of the 1960ies the world witnessed the war in Vietnam through what can still be called one of the largest ever TV war spectacles. At the very same time American astronauts looked down on Earth from the moon for the first time in human history. Although initially intended as affirming American dominance in the cold war this first view on the blue planet as whole created an image that quickly became the icon of ecological thought and central to a whole movement of counter culture.
Moon Over Da Nang draws these two contrasting media events together in Melhus’ own quirky and experimental quest to come to grips with the country’s post-socialist present in the throughway between the past and the future. Interviews with residents and dreamlike associative sequences are mixed with the documentation of the production process of a life-sized marble sculpture in Da Nang, a city in central Vietnam, which, 40 years after the end of the war in Vietnam, is being discovered by international investors for the tourism business. Traces of the past and of the war are gradually covered up by the construction of hotels and luxury resorts. At the end of the film the marble sculpture receives its finishing touches and turns out to be an Apollo astronaut.
4) Huỳnh Công Nhớ – My Grandmother’s Broken Leg (2021)
The story of my grandmother and her belief in God. Before breaking her leg, she always watched and believed in a famous online priest who healed many people. Then because of his popularity, the government asks him to move out of the church. After the accident, laid down and depressed, my grandmother – like other believers – has to challenge her own faith.
5) Lêna Bùi – Kindred (2021)
Invoking the imagination of water as a conduit to spiritual realms, Lê Na Bùi’s film poem contemplates reincarnation in a mesmerising mosaic of sounds, languages, and images taken from different places and time periods. The film opens and ends with water, passing through the underworld where boundaries between nations, species, and eras become porous. In this radically open state, we are free to flow between our own memories and those of the universal.
