Screening of “Song to the Front” and “Vietnam the Movie” (by Nguyen Trinh Thi)

Tue 21 Apr 2015, 7 pm
Big hall, Goethe Institut

From Nguyen Trinh Thi and DOCLAB:

This upcoming April 30th marks the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, also formally known in Vietnam as the Resistance War against America. On this occasion, I would like to invite you to a screening of two of my found footage films, both concern themselves with the war.

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.

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

Free Entrance. (Donations are encouraged and will go to Hanoi DocLab’s not-for-profit educational programs)

The screening is non-profit and aims for research and studies only.

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.

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DOCLAB Goethe-Institut Hanoi 56-58 Nguyễn Thái Học Ba Đình, Hà Nội http://www.hanoidoclab.org