Việt and Nam (Trương Minh Quý, 2024).
The fate of modern Vietnam is inseparable from the image. The war was the first large-scale conflict in human history to be captured on film and disseminated in real time. And yet, in cinema, hegemonic representations in the mold of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) or Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) have engendered a collective derealization in the Western imagination, where Vietnam frequently exists first as a stage for contemporary moral theater and only secondarily as a sovereign nation in its own right; its people are rendered as props, mere shooting targets, denied even a semblance of the on-screen interiority afforded to their foreign counterparts.
In the last decade, a growing number of Vietnamese filmmakers have begun asserting agency over how narratives about the country and the lives of its people get told. The recently expanded focus of European filmmaking labs to foster talent explicitly from historically underrepresented regions, like Southeast Asia, and the emergence of localized funding schemes suggest an encouraging trend. But at present, many films, like Pham Tien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (2023), winner of a Caméra d’Or, still rely heavily on support from production companies and distribution channels abroad, as Vietnam’s homegrown industry has been effectively stifled by censorship and restrictive foreign-investment clauses enforced by the one-party regime.
It is as we approach the 50th anniversary of the war’s end that Trương Minh Quý revisits the psychic terrain of his native country in Việt and Nam (2024). Trương’s third feature film, which is currently banned in Vietnam for its dark and “negative” portrayal of the country, premiered at Cannes and continues his investigations into the interlocking relationship between land, dispossession, and individual and collective memory. His works are deeply expressionist, informed by his background in documentary, and iterate upon a Bressonian interplay of sound and image. Việt and Nam slowly reveals the mass devastation lurking beneath the nation’s idyllic tropical landscape. Trương poses an urgent line of questioning: What of the martyrs who remain unknown? What awaits those who choose exile, for they can see in their homeland no future, only the past?
Việt and Nam (Trương Minh Quý, 2024).
At the turn of the 21st century, two young gay lovers, Việt and Nam, work in the coal mines. It is hard, repetitive labor, punctuated by moments of rest and tender gestures conducted in the privacy of darkness. Underground, Việt and Nam surrender to a deep corporeality. When they resurface, their relationship stays submerged in secrecy, though the coal touches everything, even above ground. Nam helps his mother pick and sell leftover coal, which then settles on the surfaces of their home, lingers on their skin and under their nails. During a delivery, a wealthy woman berates Nam for leaning on her new white balcony: “Your body is full of dust.” She patronizingly reminisces about her own family’s coal-picking days, before her son, who now sends home boxes of foreign candies, was successfully smuggled out of the country, though his current whereabouts are unspecified. Here, coal simultaneously represents opportunity and a material lack thereof. The industry built around its extraction played an important role in Vietnam’s postwar transition to a market economy, beginning with the 1986 Đổi Mới reforms; its presence immediately frames the film as a parallel process of unearthing.
Nam’s mother dreams almost nightly of her husband, who was killed at the war’s end 25 years ago, Nam’s exact age. She preemptively mourns the loss of their son—his father’s “spitting image,” though the two never met—who will soon leave her in hopes of finding a better life abroad. She tells Nam that she regrets letting his father go to the front line. On their final night together, she was folding laundry and packing clothes, as she is now; Trương has stated that the film “works in echoes.” A veteran “uncle” who fought alongside Nam’s father joins the lovers and Nam’s mother for dinner. He reminisces to no one in particular—about dead bodies, burnt flesh, how things used to be—with a far-off, misty look in his eyes. While all of the characters have experienced incredible loss in their lifetimes—Việt, too, is without a father—the woman’s grief is somehow the heaviest, perhaps because we know she is about to experience it once more.
The second, and most formally complex, part of the film loosely follows the search for the body of Nam’s father. Departing from the first act’s narrative focus, in which the setting is subordinated to character development, the film now shifts toward essay, including a dreamlike interlude in which Việt, Nam, Nam’s mother, and the veteran visit the Ba Chúc Memorial by the Cambodian border, the site of a 1978 civilian massacre by the Khmer Rouge. An offscreen Nam stoically lists the models of various explosives developed and deployed by Americans, in what amounted to calculated ecocide, as the camera pans over a field littered with red flags marking the location of unexploded bombs yet to be dislodged from the earth. At another point, the lovers slowly approach that unmarked border on foot; later, Việt, with Nam holding him from behind, drives a motorcycle off the road and into the sea, where they plunge into the waters, resurfacing in an embrace. Stitched together nonlinearly and doused in sunlight, these scenes make it increasingly difficult to determine what is real, remembered, or altogether entirely imagined.
Forgetting Vietnam (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 2015).
“Can one simply place a war into a museum?” asks postcolonial and feminist theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha in Forgetting Vietnam (2015), a lyric audiovisual collage that examines the war’s aftermath across three decades’ worth of documentary footage. Likely not, as đất nước—the Vietnamese word for “country,” which directly translates to “land water”—contains, per the voice-over and fragmented on-screen text of Trinh’s film, “sites of memory and forgetfulness,” “receptacles of history’s open wounds.” She continues: “Her land / her country / scorched / mined / bled red,” “scarred / sprayed / contaminated. The earth remembers.”
In many respects, Trương and Trinh—both việt kiều, or diasporic Vietnamese—speak from similar epistemological positions, neither fully outside nor fully inside the world they depict. Their in-betweenness appears to produce a dialectical superimposition of disparate places and periods in their work. Form and content suggest a past, present, and future that coexist, layered atop one another, compressed by trauma. The deliberate degradation of boundaries—temporally, but also at the level of the real and imaginary, documentary and fiction—acknowledges and works within, rather than superficially attempts to overcome, the limitations of the cinematic image. Consequently, their work functions to interrogate and subvert conventions of ethnographic filmmaking, which has historically reproduced the colonial logic of mastery and domination over predominantly non-Western subjects by purporting to capture some objective truth about the world at a given moment.
In her first film, Reassemblage (1982), and throughout her career, Trinh has framed her practice as an effort to “speak nearby,” as opposed to “speak about,” her subjects. Her landmark film Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) is concerned with the experience of Vietnamese women throughout history, interpolating dozens of interviews with women on their daily lives in both Vietnam and the United States. Trinh’s militant poetics across her multidisciplinary oeuvre—manifesting in an overt critique of global empire and a sustained engagement with the interdependence of politics and aesthetic production—might be viewed in the context of her lived experience of the war.
Trương, who grew up in the war’s shadow, tends to be more oblique by comparison, reflecting a diverse range of influences. Việt and Nam draws on representations in both Hollywood war cinema and Vietnamese state propaganda; his previous film, The Tree House (2019), appropriates documentary, narrative, and genre filmmaking conventions to recount the forced relocation of two of Vietnam’s Indigenous peoples and the slow death of their languages. The multiple supposed dichotomies of both Forgetting Vietnam and Việt and Nam—embodied and spectral, land and water, above and below, North and South, remembering and forgetting—are directly enumerated in the former’s narration, while the latter film expresses them instead via a quiet revelation .
In sequences intercut between the memorial scenes, the characters journey through the forest looking for a tree that Nam’s mother sees in her dreams, taken to signify the location of her husband’s body. Guided by the veteran’s recollections, the group reenacts the movements of the past. They come across a wide dirt road where children are laughing and playing soccer as the sun sets in the distance, but the scene reminds the veteran of the “road where corpses lie,” a haunting memory shared previously at the dinner table. His voice-over rationally acknowledges that it is likely not the same place—even if it was, it might be hard to tell; the use of chemical defoliants like Agent Orange so drastically altered the surrounding landscape that there are “no more canals, and no more forests on either side.” Still, he asks, rhetorically: “Why do I keep feeling like I’ve been here before?” Here is another intimation of the inextricable link between the land and its people, confirming the semantic relationship explicitly posed by Trinh.
Việt and Nam (Trương Minh Quý, 2024).
In two instances, the characters engage with their history through performance, which disrupts the film’s established timeline to locate the past in the present. At the memorial, a famous clairvoyant leads mourners to their loved ones’ alleged remains. A large group looks on as she dramatically reenacts the death of a soldier, writhing in the dirt with exaggerated expressions. Such rituals and practices of mediumship, frequently related to the Indigenous Vietnamese religion of Mother Goddess worship, were suppressed by the socialist regime but nonetheless persisted clandestinely; in the post–Đổi Mới era they have experienced a widespread resurgence. Over several transitional sequences, the mother and clairvoyant can be heard singing plaintive folk songs.
Trinh’s work similarly details how remnants of the country’s precolonial matriarchy live on through its spiritual life. Vietnamese women, routinely marginalized in or else excluded completely from filmic depictions of the war and its aftermath, have long served as vessels for collective grief. Between interviews, Surname Viet Given Name Nam weaves in excerpts from “The Tale of Kiều,” a popular nineteenth-century epic regarded as an allegory for modern Vietnam, in which a young woman is forced to sacrifice herself for the men of her family. The first theatrical film made in Vietnam, Kim Vân Kiều (1923), was an adaptation of this story produced by a French studio that hoped to spur investment in and tourism to the colony.
Finally, in the midst of a storm, the party arrives at the tree, and the opening shots of subterranean mining are recalled in the motions of digging at its base; underground is where the bodies lie. But they are forced to stop when instead of uncovering a body, they find a bomb. Nam soliloquizes in an open clearing, imagining his father’s homecoming. He gazes intently at an opening in the ground, asking: “Will your body still be intact? Or will some parts be left underground?” Then, in another affecting performance of death, an echo of the clairvoyant’s: at the sound of a gun firing, Nam collapses on the forest floor, crying out, “Father, did you die this way?”
Against the static backdrop of the memorial and its institutional weight, these individual dynamic acts, dense enough to comprise standalone works, offer up an alternate approach to mourning, a way of resisting dominant methods of historiography. They loudly insist that grief cannot be merely relegated to the past, nor contained within a few symbolic objects, whether behind glass displays or laid out in the open air. Grief is expansive, ongoing, and wholly embodied; each expression of it is inherently unique and context-dependent, and it continues in spite of the impossibility of ever attaining total resolution.
Việt and Nam (Trương Minh Quý, 2024).
The third act withdraws from the sunlight and returns to the dark. Back at the mines, Việt and Nam anticipate a new grief brought on by their imminent separation as Nam prepares for the long, dangerous voyage ahead of him. In 2019, the bodies of 39 Vietnamese migrants were discovered in a container truck, having suffocated en route to the UK. Police reports detail harrowing evidence of the victims’ final struggle to pierce a hole in the roof for air. Not only does the event serve as a point of departure for the film, but perhaps it is also the tragic, implied postscript. At night, a trafficker demonstrates how to unlock a shipping container to a large group of hopeful exiles, including Nam. They rehearse the escape, but we never see it actually happen. He tells them to cover their heads with bags to avoid activating some sort of sensor. Imagery of suffocation and of bodies encased in plastic bags recurs throughout the film, as does the terrifying sense that their fate is left entirely to external forces. “I wasn’t afraid of drowning,” Nam says in the opening scene. “I was scared of being stuck in the bag with water all around.” Trinh’s Forgetting Vietnam concludes with broader meditations on what the nation’s future might hold given the present geopolitical situation, including disputes over the South China Sea: “What drives millions of land people into the infinity of the sea?”
While writing this, I came across a video of a recent pro-Palestine protest in New York, where people were chanting, “Remember Hiroshima, remember Vietnam.” I was reminded of the first two lines of Forgetting Vietnam: “The specter of Vietnam / haunts / changes the world.” Việt and Nam constitutes a timely intimation of a painful, but necessary, truth about our world: there are seldom ever originals, just echoes of the past.