And people, especially the young ones born into an era with more freedom in the mind and an abundance of equipment and resources, yearn to do just that,” adds the filmmaker. If we shift the angle, the fact that historical and political challenges have suppressed innovative and authentic storytelling could mean that there are plenty of stories that have not been told about this country, this people, us. “History has shown that filmmakers elsewhere have sprung from challenges and made wonderful movies. You only need some visuals that painted the country ‘in the wrong color’,” says Mai Huyen Chi, adding that funding, infrastructure and distribution for independent films remain difficult too. You do not need graphic images to be censored. “Vietnam is notorious for its censorship. “The filmmakers in Vietnam are working together to initiate positive movements that I hope will help to create a new path for Vietnamese cinema and help emerging filmmakers get a chance to tell their stories truthfully.” There are a lot of restrictions when it comes to the topics we can mention and because there are no set rules, it is very difficult for filmmakers, especially new ones, to navigate,” says Linh Dan Nguyen Phan. “The biggest challenge would probably be the censorship laws that is a big debate in our country right now. The biggest issue that emerging filmmakers like Linh Dan Nguyen Phan, Pham Hoang Minh Thy and Mai Huyen Chi face in Vietnam is that of censorship.
“Most of all, I wanted to make a movie that could heal myself with the dizzying changes, preserving a bit of urban memory and my generational memory – what people are selling out there.” But in the last few years, perhaps the mountains, my homeland and nature are the ones who need to be healed,” says the filmmaker. “Every time I am down, I will come back to my mother as well as the mountains to heal. “Live In Cloud-Cuckoo Land,” her latest short, co-directed with Vu Minh Nghia, was selected at Venice’s Horizons strand in 2020. Minh Thy, who is currently pursuing a masters degree in critique in film theory debuted with the short film “The graduation of Edison,” which was selected at SGIFF 2019. Meanwhile, demolition is a theme in Pham Hoang Minh Thy’s project “Daughter of the Mountain God,” where a young female director is guided by a forest thief to find locations for her film in a mountain that is being demolished for construction. But we are going to take time to develop the screenplay, which will only make sense after substantial field research.”
We are still developing the projects and have traveled with it to some labs, workshops and online co-production markets. In the script development stage, we had planned to live with the community and travel upstream to the Cambodia-Vietnam border and beyond. “The project is aimed to include the stateless men, women, and children of the Mekong in the process. This are some people’s real lives,” the filmmaker adds. “My collaborators and I, we are aware that this is not our story. The project is at an early stage of development. It is set in a floating, stateless community on the Mekong, where a little girl tries to keep everyone together while the adults fall out over the purchase of new identities that help them move ashore. The filmmaker’s Singapore Lab project “The River Knows Our Names,” follows on from the documentary. “That ambitious idea yielded nothing, but my encounter with this community led to an impromptu short documentary, ‘Down The Stream’.”
“I chanced upon a stateless community on the Mekong in Long Xuyen city in 2014, when I tried my hands at documenting the impacts of the hydroelectric dams upstream on people’s lives,” says the filmmaker. Writing credits include “A Brixton Tale” and “The Girl from Dak Lak.” Mai Huyen Chi was editor-in-chief at MSN Vietnam, but decided to switch careers and studied for a masters degree in screenwriting in London.