Hanoi
  • DocFest
  • ĐôcPhêt
2017

05/11 - 12/11/2017
DocFest X
Đôc Phêt

VUI Studio - 3C Tong Duy Tan, Hanoi

17:00 - 19:00
19:30 - 21:30

Sound Works by Sonic Ethnographer Ernst Karel

Hanoi DocLab and the Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network (SEACRN) are pleased to present: ‘Sound Works by Sonic Ethnographer Ernst Karel’
Time: 5PM – 7PM and 7:30PM – 9:30PM Nov. 5, 2017 (02 sessions, with discussion with the artist at the end of each session, limited to 20 seats, first come first served)
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Morning and Other Times

5.1 audio, 33'
Morning and Other Times is a 5.1-channel sound composition that was recorded over a period of four weeks in the city of Chiang Mai, Thailand, in early 2014 — a few months before the military coup. The piece takes note of the voices of nonhuman participants in the urban environment, particularly dogs, literally in dialog with audible religious and political aspects of life in the city. The piece unfolds against a sensible background of nationalism and militarism in the Thai social landscape.

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Materials Recovery Facility

4-channel audio, 43'
This 4-channel piece was recorded in quad at the materials recovery facility (MRF) run by Casella Waste Systems, in the Charlestown area of northern Boston. Following the failure of Americans to sort their own recyclables, such a facility receives truckloads of mixed recyclables from many surrounding municipalities and universities, which then need to be separated out again. Fed through the facility on a network of massive overlapping conveyor belts, the materials are separated for recycling using automated methods including trommels, disc screens, optical sensors, precisely directed blasts of compressed air, eddy currents, magnets, and a large staff of human workers, who manage much of the separation by hand.

Ernst Karel

Ernst Karel

Ernst Karel makes electroacoustic music and experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance. His recent projects are edited/composed using unprocessed location recordings; in performance he sometimes combines these with analog electronics to create pieces which move between the abstract and the documentary.
Recent sound projections have been presented at Sonic Acts, Amsterdam; Oboro, Montreal; EMPAC, Troy NY; Arsenal, Berlin; and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Sound installations in collaboration with Helen Mirra have been exhibited at Culturgest, Lisbon; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Audiorama, Stockholm; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; and in the 2012 Sao Paulo Bienal.
Video with multichannel sound collaborations include Ah humanity! (2015, with Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel) and Single Stream (2014, with Toby Lee and Pawel Wojtasik). Other projects include the long-running electroacoustic duo EKG, and the location recording/performance collective the New England Phonographers Union. Recent nonfiction films on which he has done sound work include The Iron Ministry, Manakamana, and Leviathan, all produced in the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, where as a Lecturer on Anthropology, he teaches a class in sonic ethnography.

VUI Studio - 3C Tong Duy Tan, Hanoi

10:00 - 18:00

Field Recording and Sound Design workshop with Ernst Karel

This two-day workshop will focus on an approach to documentary audio through the practice of location recording and composing with location recordings. (Often called ‘field recordings’, these might better be considered as ‘fields recordings’.) This approach to working with sound does not privilege the human voice, and considers the process of recording as part of engaging in an encounter with a social situation or lived environment through all of one’s senses. And through this encounter, audio recordings arise. Once audio recordings have arisen, we engage with them anew in the process of listening back and editing.
In the workshop we will listen to and discuss relevant audio pieces, as well as ideas about audio as a way of exploring ‘place’. We will then get started right away by choosing a site or network of sites, where participants will engage in the acts of listening and recording. Individually, participants will listen back to their recordings, and make selections to present to the rest of the group. At this point, the emphasis shifts from the original site of engagement with sound, to the new space of an encounter with audio in the studio. As a group we will listen to, discuss, and work on issues of editing and composition both collectively and individually, using a multitrack editing environment (Reaper).

Manzi - 14 Phan Huy Ich, Hanoi

11:00 - 22:00

Đôc Phêt in loop

1. Sensory Ethnographic Lab SEL 1:
MANAKAMANA (118’, 2013, dir. Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez)
Pilgrims make an ancient journey in a state-of-the-art cable car. Their rides unfold in real-time, highlighting interactions with one another, the landscape, and this strange new mode of conveyance. Through these encounters, the film opens a surprising window onto contemporary Nepali lives, propelled along by the country’s idiosyncratic modernization.

2. VINA Experimenta (55’):
– Bad Luck of House Construction (3′, 2017, Tạ Minh Đức)
– Story from the Opposite Side (17’, 2016, Lê Đình Chung)
– Hunger (6′, 2017, Lê Đình Chung)
– A í a (5′, 2016, Nguyễn Song)
– Untitled (2’, 2017, Thịnh Nguyễn)
– Water Dream (7′, 2016, Nguyễn Hải Yến)
– Untitled (10′, 2016, Linh Khỉ)
– Nằm xuống nghỉ ngơi (6′, 2017, Lê Xuân Tiến)

Nhà Sàn Collective - 15th floor, HNCC building, No. 1 Luong Yen, Hanoi

11:00 - 17:00

In a green island (20' loop, 5 channel video installation, 2017, Jamie Maxtone-Graham)

With a voyeuristic camera and an ambient sound environment, the five screens frame individuals within a landscape that they at once inhabit and are yet not conscious of. The bodies, male and female, can be seen as both a natural part of the landscape and vulnerable within it. There is disquiet in the ambience of it.

17:30

Elegy for the time being (75', 2017, Trâm Lương)

‘She said no’, and in that moment there was despair and hope. When the archive of memories becomes dead weight, stories have to be told anew. Elegy for The Time Being is a documentary film project inspired by the life of Huỳnh Sanh Thông – the first Vietnamese scholar to arrive at Yale University in the 1950s. The film moves through the alleys of the life of Huỳnh Sanh Thông to weave together moments that glimmer and sink, waiting to be told, and retold. Enmeshed with the musical quest of An Tran, a young Vietnamese guitarist and a personal seeking of Tram Luong, a young storyteller, the life and times of Huỳnh Sanh Thông find a new spirit.

19:15

Vina Romance: Artist film program, Q&A with artists after screening

1. Vietnam Romance (19’, 2003, dir. Eddo Stern)
“Vietnam Romance” is compiled from the sources available exclusively on the computer desktop environment – games, graphics and music. A remix of the Vietnam war experience with a MIDI soundtrack and computer game clips, Vietnam Romance is a tour of nostalgia for romantics and deathmatch veterans.Film critic Ed Halter, described a film version of the project as exploring “a peculiarly American memory-trip, one in which the legacy of a gruesome war has become indistinguishable from pleasurable, if mythic-tragic, entertainments.”

2. Destination Finale (9’, 2008, dir. Philip Widmann)
A man travels Europe. Shortly thereafter, American troops enter the ground war in Vietnam. Destination Finale is an original 8mm amateur film, shot in 1964, found in Saigon in 2005 and edited by Widmann with a sense of drama.

3. In Silence Things Speak (21′, 2017, Trương Minh Quý)
A wooden wardrobe is burning. A man and a woman are looking at a seemingly cancer lump on the man’s body that is reflected in the wardrobe mirror. The light is weakening and the fire is still burning.
“In this short, I juxtaposed some used footage from my first feature film (2016) with the other one shot in 2015, in order to create another way of receiving the imagery material. In some certain aspect, we could say this is a found footage film, or a self-reflexive found footage film, because here the filmmaker has worked and re-worked out of the ground of his own pre-existing work.”

4. Drowning Dew (40’, 2017, dir. Đỗ Văn Hoàng & Trương Quế Chi)
“Drowning Dew” is an artwork that, depending on the occasion, can be considered as series of experimental films if it is set up as one-monitor consecutive screening, or as video installation with 6-channel projected structure. The film is a critical yet poetically fictional depiction of rapid changes of environment, landscape, human habits and society in Central Highlands of Vietnam. The film series contain 6 mini pieces that are loosely based on Jrai myth of posthumous metamorphosis. The myth acts as an open narrative framework, and as allegory of inevitable transformations of the area during this modernization and industrialization, which occur also in different regions in Southeast Asia.
This is a work of Art Labor and created in collaboration with 2 filmmakers Truong Que Chi and Do Van Hoang, who have individually conducted researches on landscape, religion, ethnography and aesthetics in Central Highlands for long time. This work will premier at Centre Georges Pompidou in October 2017 within Cosmopolis exhibition.

VUI Studio - 3C Tong Duy Tan, Hanoi

10:00 - 18:00

Field Recording and Sound Design workshop with Ernst Karel

This two-day workshop will focus on an approach to documentary audio through the practice of location recording and composing with location recordings. (Often called ‘field recordings’, these might better be considered as ‘fields recordings’.) This approach to working with sound does not privilege the human voice, and considers the process of recording as part of engaging in an encounter with a social situation or lived environment through all of one’s senses. And through this encounter, audio recordings arise. Once audio recordings have arisen, we engage with them anew in the process of listening back and editing.
In the workshop we will listen to and discuss relevant audio pieces, as well as ideas about audio as a way of exploring ‘place’. We will then get started right away by choosing a site or network of sites, where participants will engage in the acts of listening and recording. Individually, participants will listen back to their recordings, and make selections to present to the rest of the group. At this point, the emphasis shifts from the original site of engagement with sound, to the new space of an encounter with audio in the studio. As a group we will listen to, discuss, and work on issues of editing and composition both collectively and individually, using a multitrack editing environment (Reaper).

Nhà Sàn Collective - 15th floor, HNCC building, No. 1 Luong Yen, Hanoi

17:30

Found Footage South East Asia, Q&A with Merv Espina & Nguyễn Trinh Thi after screening

1. The Kalampag Tracking Agency: 30 years of Philippine Moving Image (67’ | Philippines | Various years / Various filmmakers, curated by Shireen Seno & Merv Espina)
Overcoming institutional and personal lapses to give attention to little-seen works—some quite recent, some surviving loss and decomposition – “Kalampag Tracking Agency” collects loose parts in motion, a series of bangs, or kalampag in Tagalog, assembled by individual strengths and how they might resonate off each other and a contemporary audience. Featuring some of the most striking films and videos from the Philippines and its diaspora, this is an initiative that continues to navigate the uncharted topographies of Filipino alternative and experimental moving image practice.

2. Eleven Men (28’, 2016, Nguyễn Trinh Thi)
“Eleven Men” is composed of scenes from a range of Vietnamese classic narrative films featuring the same central actress, Nhu Quynh. Spanning three decades of her legendary acting career, most of the appropriated movies — from 1966 to 2000 — were produced by the state-owned Vietnam Feature Film Studio.
The film’s text was adapted from “Eleven Sons”, a short story by Franz Kafka first published in 1919, which begins with a father’s declaration: “I have eleven sons”, then describes each one of them in acute and ironic detail. Transposing the father’s voice of Kafka’s story, the film begins with a woman stating: “I have eleven men”.

Goethe Institute - 56-58 Nguyen Thai Hoc, Hanoi

19:00

Selection from Hamburg International Short Film Festival (curated by Birgit Glombitza)

In her program “Sense and Sensibility” she walks us through an international choice of filmic experiments which deconstruct narration, production or even the film picture itself with self-reflecting skepticism. These productions mostly by European filmmakers were successful at the film festivals from Rotterdam, Hamburg, Oberhausen to Tampere. They won prices or turned out to be coin a new way of making short films. However, there is- we admit a considerable level of Eurocentrism.

Goethe Institute - 56-58 Nguyen Thai Hoc, Hanoi

09:30 - 16:30

Symposium: Time, Space, and the Visceral in Southeast Asian Cinema

Focus of the Hanoi symposium: on experimental filmmaking, curating, film education and activism From 2016 to 2018, the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas will extend its biennial conferences with a series of workshops designed to facilitate dialogue across critical and creative practice. Beginning with a conference held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in July 2016, the network will bring together filmmakers, scholars, students, and the general public in subsequent events in Los Angeles, California, Hanoi, Vietnam, and Glasgow, Scotland.

19:00

Selection from Hamburg International Short Film Festival (part 2)

“Time is Short” is the title of the second program. A collection of films where the spectators views, the artistry of the camera-eye and the film itself are presented as illusion machines. These are short films where cinema confronts itself and with its own phantasies. We talk about illogical synchronicities and impossible rotation equipment, flying cities that were built through faulty 3D-printer and about tricks with gravity. We come across shellfish which settle overcrowded landscapes with an ethnographic perspective, we meet topside-turned skies and a cineastic kinetics which only in short films.

Nhà Sàn Collective - 15th floor, HNCC building, No. 1 Luong Yen, Hanoi

17:30

Realities: World Premiere of 4 Doclab films (70’, 2017, produced by Jamie Maxtone-Graham) Q&A with filmmakers after screening

1. Summer siesta: 6th hour counting from dawn (15’, 2017, Nguyễn Hải Yến)
In the midsummer of a tropical country, persons are taking their siesta, persons dream of time, nothing but the tranquility of time.

2. A death is a death is not a death (14’, 2017, Nguyễn Thị Huệ)
A vast rice field. An announcement. A hopeless escape. A death.

3. Untitled.mp4 (15’, 2017, Lê Xuân Tiến)
A found footage film with material and videos appropriated from the Internet, exploring different scenarios that once occurred, are occurring or could possibly occur.

4. Frame of traces (23′, 2017, Ngô Thị Thanh)
A landscape floats on traces of reality. There will be portraits and lives (un-)framed by sounds, images, voices that constantly stretch and vanish in a fragile flow of signification. It does not mean the film represents the unpresentable. 23 minutes of (de-)constructed time, space, concepts, and art forms, the film echoes innermost feelings.

20:00

The Mengkerang Project (90', 2013-2015, Sow Yee Au) Q&A with artist after screening

The Mengkerang Project was initiated by Au Sow Yee from 2013 to 2015. Through these series of works, Sow Yee reexamine the intermingling psychic geology and historical borders of Malaysia, through an imaginary place, Mengkerang.

Au Sow Yee was born and grew up in Malaysia, she now based in Taipei and Kuala Lumpur. Sow Yee attained her M.F.A degree from San Francisco Art Institute (U.S.A) majored in experimental filmmaking and Taipei National University of the Arts, majored in New Media Arts. Her works focuses mainly in questioning, exploring as well as expanding the relation between images, image making, history, politics and power, through video installation and other mediums. Sow Yee’s recent works focus on re-imagined history of Malaysia, South-east Asia and it’s related region from perceptions and ideologies bounded by the Cold War. Meanwhile, she also continue her interest in image making mechanism, creating live cinema performance using self-made mechanism and mechanical film projectors. Sow Yee’s works were exhibited in MMCA (Seoul), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), HKW (Berlin), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai) etc. Sow Yee was the co-founder and co-curator for KLEX (Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival) in 2010, 2011 and 2016. She is also one of the guest writer for online magazine No Man’s Land and co-founded Kuala Lumpur’s Rumah Attap Library and Collective in 2017.

Nhà Sàn Collective - 15th floor, HNCC building, No. 1 Luong Yen, Hanoi

11:00 - 17:00

In a green island (20' loop, 5 channel video installation, 2017, Jamie Maxtone-Graham)

With a voyeuristic camera and an ambient sound environment, the five screens frame individuals within a landscape that they at once inhabit and are yet not conscious of. The bodies, male and female, can be seen as both a natural part of the landscape and vulnerable within it. There is disquiet in the ambience of it.

Goethe Institute - 56-58 Nguyen Thai Hoc, Hanoi

09:00 - 16:30

Symposium: Time, Space, and the Visceral in Southeast Asian Cinema (cont.)

Focus of the Hanoi symposium: on experimental filmmaking, curating, film education and activism From 2016 to 2018, the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas will extend its biennial conferences with a series of workshops designed to facilitate dialogue across critical and creative practice. Beginning with a conference held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in July 2016, the network will bring together filmmakers, scholars, students, and the general public in subsequent events in Los Angeles, California, Hanoi, Vietnam, and Glasgow, Scotland.

17:00

Selection from Hamburg International Short Film Festival (part 3)

In the third program, “The Universe and Me”, German film and video artists discuss national and sociocultural sensitivities. In “Alienation” which received many awards teenagers talk about tricks to undermine media-pedagogic rules or to avoid curfews set by their parents. They come across as animated pimpled monsters or YouTube-make-up-princesses, who are preoccupied with their own and the other sex behind giggling and posing. In “The Bear” and “Satanic Jungle” we feel the unease about our own culture, the left-liberal saturation of a small family and deep rooted paternalism of a nation. The video artist Björn Melhus presents in his travesties (“I´m not the Enemy”) traumatized post-war soldiers who quote from American war and hero films. In “Symbolic Threat” the street art duo Wermke/Leinkauf turn Brooklyn Bridge into a state of political emergency.

19:00

Hanoi DocFest 2017 Opening Ceremony

20:00

Screening and Q&A with filmmakers

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Flat Sunlight (2016, Lena Bui)

Giang visits her aunt Muoi in Tien Giang for the summer to give her mother personal space and time to sort things out.
The slow rhythm of countryside life, children's games, and close relationship within the neighborhood help Giang forget about her personal troubles and the hot Mekong sun. Seeing her 60-year-old aunt constantly busy with farm work, Giang decides to help out.
The film develops through Giang's perspective, weaving documentary footages with a fictional storyline. Through Giang and aunt Muoi's developing relationship we get a sense of the slow and drawn-out rhythm of life in the rural South of Vietnam, the close contact between human and animals, the switch from traditional methods to reliance on industrial feed, concerns surrounding food safety, and the perception and interests of a typical farming household in the Mekong Delta. The film also introduces a new angle into the relationship between human and animals, and the inseparable ties between life and death.

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Drowning Dew (2017, Đỗ Văn Hoàng & Trương Quế Chi)

'Drowning Dew' is an artwork that, depending on the occasion, can be considered as series of experimental films if it is set up as one-monitor consecutive screening, or as video installation with 6-channel projected structure. The film is a critical yet poetically fictional depiction of rapid changes of environment, landscape, human habits and society in Central Highlands of Vietnam. The film series contain 6 mini pieces that are loosely based on Jrai myth of posthumous metamorphosis. The myth acts as an open narrative framework, and as allegory of inevitable transformations of the area during this modernization and industrialization, which occur also in different regions in Southeast Asia.
This is a work of Art Labor and created in collaboration with 2 filmmakers Truong Que Chi and Do Van Hoang, who have individually conducted researches on landscape, religion, ethnography and aesthetics in Central Highlands for long time. This work will premier at Centre Georges Pompidou in October 2017 within Cosmopolis exhibition.

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Summer Siesta: 6th hour counting from dawn (2017, Nguyễn Hải Yến)

In the midsummer of a tropical country, persons are taking their siesta, persons dream of time, nothing but the tranquility of time.

Goethe Institute - 56-58 Nguyen Thai Hoc, Hanoi

10:00 - 12:00

Portrait (part 1) screening and Q&A with filmmakers

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Hospital Apartment (2017, Nguyễn Thanh Vân)

A group of people coming from different regions of Vietnam live in the same slumpdog to cure their children's illnesses. Their life is a struggle between a lack of material, physical health and emotional pressure... The film depicts a life of those who relentlessly fight against sickness.

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The Gifts (2017, Nguyễn Thị Thanh Huyền)

Many people come to Inner Space, a non-profit center that helps people enrich their inner lives, to find ways to cope with and heal the hurt that they are having. The film listens to the people and their stories.

17:00 - 19:00

Portrait (part 2) screening and Q&A with filmmakers

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March 23rd (2017, Phạm Thị Hảo)

This is a story about a family on Kham Thien street, Hanoi. They have been waiting for their son to be shortly out of prison. 18 years away from the family and the normal life has created gaps in a person's life that are hardly fulfilled.

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The Turtle Slide (2016, Kim Đức)

``Cầu trượt con rùa`` là bộ phim tài liệu 35 phút về hành trình của Judith Hansen, người đi khoả lấp giấc mơ của bà xây dựng những chiếc cầu trượt ở Hà Nội - một thủ đô náo nhiệt nhưng thiếu trầm trọng các khu vui chơi dành cho trẻ em.

20:00 - 22:00

On the Endless Road (2015, Síu Phạm) Q&A with filmmaker after screening

A documentary-fiction tracks down an old hippy dead-end, final journey…
On the highlands of Northern Vietnam, an old white-man travels on his wretched motorbike, makes friends with a young well-off local couple who has a flying cam. When the old man looses everything, he comes back to the grandmother’s house of his new local friend, but the couple leaves and let him with the old woman and her niece, a Vietnamese school-girl, 10 years-old. The flying cam hits an eye injuring the old man who hopes to stay in this place, to help the little girl for writing an English poem, but the police tells him to leave. We don’t know where will be the old man, is he dead or not on the road?
on the endless road 3on the endless road 1on the endless road 4on the endless road 2

Nhà Sàn Collective - 15th floor, HNCC building, No. 1 Luong Yen, Hanoi

13:00

Inside Outside, Q&A with filmmaker Doan Hong Le after screening

1. Moon Over Da Nang (15’, 2015, dir. Bjorn Melhus)
Towards the end of the 1960s 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.

2. My Father the Last Communist (69’, 2016, dir. Đoàn Hồng Lê)
The director’s father is now in the beginning of Alzheimer. He forgets what’s happening in the present, but remembers the memories in far past. The present life is going on, but he stops with memories of his time.
In the last days of his life, he’s struggling to keep his pure communist ideology, although the reality in Vietnam today is very different from what he imagined when he joined Revolution 70 years ago. It’s a tragedy of his generation who dedicated their lives to fighting the wars against France and America. This is a story about a disappearing spirit of the communist generation and the crisis of faith in Vietnam today.

15:00

Back to the Future - Q&A with filmmakers after screening

1. The Man Who Build Cambodia (37’, 2016, dir. Christopher Rompre)
“The Man Who Build Cambodia” is a narrative documentary exploring the life of Vann Molyvann, an architect whose work came to represent a new identity for a country emerging from independence, and whose incredible story encompasses Cambodia’s turbulent journey as a modern nation.
In Cambodia’s post-independence period Molyvann had been at the centre of a renaissance, developing a distinctive architectural style, New Khmer Architecture, that completely changed the face of Cambodia.
Then in 1970, at his creative peak, Cambodia’s political landscape disintegrates, forcing him to flee as the Khmer Rouge plunges the country into genocide and civil war. Finally returning in the 1990s, Molyvann finds a different country than the one he had left. He’s marginalized from public life and many of his works are destroyed or neglected.
Today, like many countries is Asia, Cambodia is developing rapidly and unevenly. Nearly 90, the film follows Vann Molyvann as he reflects on the country he’s put so much of himself into.
At the heart of The Man Who Built Cambodia is Vann Molyvann’s lifelong engagement with the identity of the Khmer people, and his attempt to create a unique architectural style that gives modern expression to that identity.

2. From Now On (34’, 2017, dir. Vi Đỗ)
“From Now On” attempts to trace back to the history of Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong and the relationship between politics and the dilemma of refugee crisis with the correspondent immigration policy of Hong Kong towards Vietnamese nationals today. The film starts with a secretly recorded conversation between the filmmaker and an Immigration officer, which the filmmaker was hassled by a typical bureaucratic manner. The film unfolds a historical narrative of Vietnamese boatpeople, from early 70s until the year 2000.
The filmmaker conducts interviews and conversations with Vietnamese refugees and non-refugees, as well as Hong Kong authorities, and scholars. The film, then, is a personal way of re-assessing the institutional definition of “refugee” throughout socio-political conflict of history. The film is also an expression of the complicated relationship between the filmmaker and Hong Kong, the place she wanted to call home.

3. Everyday’s the Seventies (15’, 2018, dir. Nguyễn Trinh Thi)

17:00

Death in Arizona (77’, 2014, dir. Tin Dirdamal) Q&A with filmmaker after screening

“Death in Arizona” is a futuristic documentary of lost love and a tale of a dying civilization. It is an autobiographical portrayal of a man who returns to his lost love’s empty apartment in pursuit of answers. The distant voices of a tribe in Arizona that survived a meteorite strike make their way into the third story apartment of this obscure Bolivian city.

Nhà Sàn Collective - 15th floor, HNCC building, No. 1 Luong Yen, Hanoi

13:00

Absent Without Leave (83', 2016, dir. Lau Kek Haut)

They sacrificed their lives fighting for the independence of their country, but their stories remain untold for 60 years.
The story begins with a man’s portrait, which has been hanging for more than 30 years in an old wooden house where I was born and grew up in Perak, Malaysia. It’s long become a taboo that my families do not talk about this man, not even to bring up his name or his past. Eventually I found out he is my grandfather, who sacrificed his life fighting for Malaysia’s independence and decolonisation, but his and his comrades’ stories are excluded from history. This documentary set out to unveil the mysteries.

14:30

Sensory Ethnographic Lab SEL 2 (85’) Q&A with filmmakers after screening

1. Demolition (62′, 2008, dir. J.P. Sniadecki)
A very strong but rarely seen earlier work by JP Sniadecki, who later made FOREIGN PARTS (with Véréna Paravel), PEOPLE’S PARK (with Libbie Cohn), THE IRON MINISTRY, and most recently EL MAR LA MAR (with Joshua Bonetta), Chaiqian (Demolition) is a portrait of migrant labor, urban space, and ephemeral relationships in the center of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in western China.
Một tác phẩm rất vững nhưng trước giờ ít trình chiếu của JP Sniadecki, người sau này đạo diễn Các Bộ Phận Lạ (với Véréna Paravel), Công Viên Công (với Libbie Cohn), Nội Các Sắt và gần đây nhất, El Mar La Mar (với Joshua Bonetta), Chaiqian (Phá Dỡ) là một bức chân dung về lao động di cư, không gian đô thị, và các mối quan hệ liên tục biến tan ở trung tâm Thành Đô, thủ phủ của tỉnh Tứ Xuyên phía tây Trung Quốc.

2. Single Stream (23’, 2014, Pawel Wojtasik, Toby Kim Lee & Ernst Karel)
“Single Stream” takes a close look at the problem of waste, through a visual and sonic exploration of a recycling facility. The title refers to the “single stream” method of recycling in which all types of recyclables are initially gathered together, and sorted later at a specialized facility. With Single Stream, viewers enter one of the largest of these materials recovery facilities in the US. Inside a cavernous building, a vast machine complex runs like clock-work, sorting a steady stream of glass, metal, paper and plastic carried on conveyor belts criss-crossing the space, dotted with workers in neon vests. The interwoven movements of human and machine produce sounds and images that are overwhelming, but also beautiful, and even revelatory. Blurring the line between observation and abstraction, Single Stream is a meditation on our society’s culture of excess and its consequences.

17:00

We Don't Care About The Music Anyway (80’, 2009, Cédric Dupire & Gaspard Kuentz)

“We Don’t Care About The Music Anyway” is a documentary film associating and confronting the work of 8 musicians from Tokyo’s new music scene with the Japanese society. “Rather than a film about music, we like to think of “We Don’t Care..” as a film about sound and its perception” say directors CédricDupire and Gaspard Kuentz. How else to approach Tokyo’s world renowned avant-garde music scene? The amplified sound of a controlled heartbeat; the screech of an electric cello played with ferocity; turntablism at its most esoteric; walls of guitar drones over 8-bit soundscapes: these are the points where a diverse, ultra-modern cityscape meets ancient traditions in creative youths.

Heritage Space library, 1st floor Dolphin Plaza, 6 Nguyễn Hoàng/28 Trần Bình, Mỹ Đình 2, Hanoi

18:30 - 20:30

On the Endless Road (2015, Síu Phạm) Q&A with filmmaker after screening

A documentary-fiction tracks down an old hippy dead-end, final journey…
On the highlands of Northern Vietnam, an old white-man travels on his wretched motorbike, makes friends with a young well-off local couple who has a flying cam. When the old man looses everything, he comes back to the grandmother’s house of his new local friend, but the couple leaves and let him with the old woman and her niece, a Vietnamese school-girl, 10 years-old. The flying cam hits an eye injuring the old man who hopes to stay in this place, to help the little girl for writing an English poem, but the police tells him to leave. We don’t know where will be the old man, is he dead or not on the road?
on the endless road 3on the endless road 4on the endless road 2on the endless road 1

Goethe Institute - 56-58 Nguyen Thai Hoc, Hanoi

10:00 - 12:00

Portrait (part 3) Q&A with filmmakers after screening

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Dedicated to Grandpa Dieu (2016, Nguyễn Hiền Anh)

This documentary depicts the everyday life of an elderly person, Mr. Dieu, in busy Hanoi city. He leads a simple life in a modest house with a blue wooden door on a small corner of a busy street. The documentary focuses on Mr. Dieu – a man with strong ambition - who used to work as a freelance interpreter at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in the mid-1960s. He works very hard, translating books he likes, but he has never tried to publish any of them himself.``

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The Loner (2017, Hoàng Việt Đức)

The Loner is a documentary film about an angle of a guitarist's life - Thanh Da Nang. He has a special aptitude and passion for music, to the extent that he is willing to sacrifice his family life for music. The journey of this film is also a story of a middle-aged man lost and struggling with this life.``

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Huong Gau's Kitchen (2017, Trần Thị Huyền Trang)

The movie depicts the life of a young graduate who made the decision to come back to her hometown to start a business instead of staying in the city. With her passion for baking, she decided to work as an online baker.

18:00 - 19:00

Then & Now (part 1)

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Das Gestell (2017, Philip Widmann)


A Japanese philosopher writes a letter to a famous German colleague. He asks the German to advise the Japanese people how to deal with the permeation of modern life by technology. More than 50 years later, the same issues are being discussed among academics and aspiring engineers. It is hard to grasp how humans and technology continue to coexist. Resorting to biographical trivia, mythological histories and the recounting of dreams is not helping them to see these issues any clearer. In the grainy images of the film, landscapes from an uncertain time appear, occasionally flooded by water and a cacophony of brass players. The uncontrollable finds its ways into a world that tries to minimise risks and thus creates new dangers. (Das Gestell)

19:00

Then & Now (part 2) - DocLab Alumni Party: A Special Event

DocLab’s classic workshop with a humble title “Basic Filmmaking” has arrived at its 9th edition. It has been the homeplace of many outstanding independent filmmakers since its creation. On the occasion that another one of these classic workshops is about to come to an end, we would like to invite everyone: every alumni of the past, present, and future to come and celebrate this wonderful workshop, to connect and to reconnect, and to listen to the many stories that happened during the process, the ups and the downs, the tears and the joys in this part of town.
+ Sun 5/11

VUI Studio - 3C Tong Duy Tan, Hanoi

17:00 - 19:00
19:30 - 21:30

Sound Works by Sonic Ethnographer Ernst Karel

Hanoi DocLab and the Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network (SEACRN) are pleased to present: ‘Sound Works by Sonic Ethnographer Ernst Karel’
Time: 5PM – 7PM and 7:30PM – 9:30PM Nov. 5, 2017 (02 sessions, with discussion with the artist at the end of each session, limited to 20 seats, first come first served)
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Morning and Other Times

5.1 audio, 33'
Morning and Other Times is a 5.1-channel sound composition that was recorded over a period of four weeks in the city of Chiang Mai, Thailand, in early 2014 — a few months before the military coup. The piece takes note of the voices of nonhuman participants in the urban environment, particularly dogs, literally in dialog with audible religious and political aspects of life in the city. The piece unfolds against a sensible background of nationalism and militarism in the Thai social landscape.

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Materials Recovery Facility

4-channel audio, 43'
This 4-channel piece was recorded in quad at the materials recovery facility (MRF) run by Casella Waste Systems, in the Charlestown area of northern Boston. Following the failure of Americans to sort their own recyclables, such a facility receives truckloads of mixed recyclables from many surrounding municipalities and universities, which then need to be separated out again. Fed through the facility on a network of massive overlapping conveyor belts, the materials are separated for recycling using automated methods including trommels, disc screens, optical sensors, precisely directed blasts of compressed air, eddy currents, magnets, and a large staff of human workers, who manage much of the separation by hand.

Ernst Karel

Ernst Karel

Ernst Karel makes electroacoustic music and experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance. His recent projects are edited/composed using unprocessed location recordings; in performance he sometimes combines these with analog electronics to create pieces which move between the abstract and the documentary.
Recent sound projections have been presented at Sonic Acts, Amsterdam; Oboro, Montreal; EMPAC, Troy NY; Arsenal, Berlin; and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Sound installations in collaboration with Helen Mirra have been exhibited at Culturgest, Lisbon; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Audiorama, Stockholm; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; and in the 2012 Sao Paulo Bienal.
Video with multichannel sound collaborations include Ah humanity! (2015, with Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel) and Single Stream (2014, with Toby Lee and Pawel Wojtasik). Other projects include the long-running electroacoustic duo EKG, and the location recording/performance collective the New England Phonographers Union. Recent nonfiction films on which he has done sound work include The Iron Ministry, Manakamana, and Leviathan, all produced in the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, where as a Lecturer on Anthropology, he teaches a class in sonic ethnography.
+ Mon 6/11

VUI Studio - 3C Tong Duy Tan, Hanoi

10:00 - 18:00

Field Recording and Sound Design workshop with Ernst Karel

This two-day workshop will focus on an approach to documentary audio through the practice of location recording and composing with location recordings. (Often called ‘field recordings’, these might better be considered as ‘fields recordings’.) This approach to working with sound does not privilege the human voice, and considers the process of recording as part of engaging in an encounter with a social situation or lived environment through all of one’s senses. And through this encounter, audio recordings arise. Once audio recordings have arisen, we engage with them anew in the process of listening back and editing.
In the workshop we will listen to and discuss relevant audio pieces, as well as ideas about audio as a way of exploring ‘place’. We will then get started right away by choosing a site or network of sites, where participants will engage in the acts of listening and recording. Individually, participants will listen back to their recordings, and make selections to present to the rest of the group. At this point, the emphasis shifts from the original site of engagement with sound, to the new space of an encounter with audio in the studio. As a group we will listen to, discuss, and work on issues of editing and composition both collectively and individually, using a multitrack editing environment (Reaper).
+ Tue 7/11

Manzi - 14 Phan Huy Ich, Hanoi

11:00 - 22:00

Đôc Phêt in loop

1. Sensory Ethnographic Lab SEL 1:
MANAKAMANA (118’, 2013, dir. Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez)
Pilgrims make an ancient journey in a state-of-the-art cable car. Their rides unfold in real-time, highlighting interactions with one another, the landscape, and this strange new mode of conveyance. Through these encounters, the film opens a surprising window onto contemporary Nepali lives, propelled along by the country’s idiosyncratic modernization.

2. VINA Experimenta (55’):
– Bad Luck of House Construction (3′, 2017, Tạ Minh Đức)
– Story from the Opposite Side (17’, 2016, Lê Đình Chung)
– Hunger (6′, 2017, Lê Đình Chung)
– A í a (5′, 2016, Nguyễn Song)
– Untitled (2’, 2017, Thịnh Nguyễn)
– Water Dream (7′, 2016, Nguyễn Hải Yến)
– Untitled (10′, 2016, Linh Khỉ)
– Nằm xuống nghỉ ngơi (6′, 2017, Lê Xuân Tiến)

Nhà Sàn Collective - 15th floor, HNCC building, No. 1 Luong Yen, Hanoi

11:00 - 17:00

In a green island (20' loop, 5 channel video installation, 2017, Jamie Maxtone-Graham)

With a voyeuristic camera and an ambient sound environment, the five screens frame individuals within a landscape that they at once inhabit and are yet not conscious of. The bodies, male and female, can be seen as both a natural part of the landscape and vulnerable within it. There is disquiet in the ambience of it.

17:30

Elegy for the time being (75', 2017, Trâm Lương)

‘She said no’, and in that moment there was despair and hope. When the archive of memories becomes dead weight, stories have to be told anew. Elegy for The Time Being is a documentary film project inspired by the life of Huỳnh Sanh Thông – the first Vietnamese scholar to arrive at Yale University in the 1950s. The film moves through the alleys of the life of Huỳnh Sanh Thông to weave together moments that glimmer and sink, waiting to be told, and retold. Enmeshed with the musical quest of An Tran, a young Vietnamese guitarist and a personal seeking of Tram Luong, a young storyteller, the life and times of Huỳnh Sanh Thông find a new spirit.

19:15

Vina Romance: Artist film program, Q&A with artists after screening

1. Vietnam Romance (19’, 2003, dir. Eddo Stern)
“Vietnam Romance” is compiled from the sources available exclusively on the computer desktop environment – games, graphics and music. A remix of the Vietnam war experience with a MIDI soundtrack and computer game clips, Vietnam Romance is a tour of nostalgia for romantics and deathmatch veterans.Film critic Ed Halter, described a film version of the project as exploring “a peculiarly American memory-trip, one in which the legacy of a gruesome war has become indistinguishable from pleasurable, if mythic-tragic, entertainments.”

2. Destination Finale (9’, 2008, dir. Philip Widmann)
A man travels Europe. Shortly thereafter, American troops enter the ground war in Vietnam. Destination Finale is an original 8mm amateur film, shot in 1964, found in Saigon in 2005 and edited by Widmann with a sense of drama.

3. In Silence Things Speak (21′, 2017, Trương Minh Quý)
A wooden wardrobe is burning. A man and a woman are looking at a seemingly cancer lump on the man’s body that is reflected in the wardrobe mirror. The light is weakening and the fire is still burning.
“In this short, I juxtaposed some used footage from my first feature film (2016) with the other one shot in 2015, in order to create another way of receiving the imagery material. In some certain aspect, we could say this is a found footage film, or a self-reflexive found footage film, because here the filmmaker has worked and re-worked out of the ground of his own pre-existing work.”

4. Drowning Dew (40’, 2017, dir. Đỗ Văn Hoàng & Trương Quế Chi)
“Drowning Dew” is an artwork that, depending on the occasion, can be considered as series of experimental films if it is set up as one-monitor consecutive screening, or as video installation with 6-channel projected structure. The film is a critical yet poetically fictional depiction of rapid changes of environment, landscape, human habits and society in Central Highlands of Vietnam. The film series contain 6 mini pieces that are loosely based on Jrai myth of posthumous metamorphosis. The myth acts as an open narrative framework, and as allegory of inevitable transformations of the area during this modernization and industrialization, which occur also in different regions in Southeast Asia.
This is a work of Art Labor and created in collaboration with 2 filmmakers Truong Que Chi and Do Van Hoang, who have individually conducted researches on landscape, religion, ethnography and aesthetics in Central Highlands for long time. This work will premier at Centre Georges Pompidou in October 2017 within Cosmopolis exhibition.

+ Wed 8/11

VUI Studio - 3C Tong Duy Tan, Hanoi

10:00 - 18:00

Field Recording and Sound Design workshop with Ernst Karel

This two-day workshop will focus on an approach to documentary audio through the practice of location recording and composing with location recordings. (Often called ‘field recordings’, these might better be considered as ‘fields recordings’.) This approach to working with sound does not privilege the human voice, and considers the process of recording as part of engaging in an encounter with a social situation or lived environment through all of one’s senses. And through this encounter, audio recordings arise. Once audio recordings have arisen, we engage with them anew in the process of listening back and editing.
In the workshop we will listen to and discuss relevant audio pieces, as well as ideas about audio as a way of exploring ‘place’. We will then get started right away by choosing a site or network of sites, where participants will engage in the acts of listening and recording. Individually, participants will listen back to their recordings, and make selections to present to the rest of the group. At this point, the emphasis shifts from the original site of engagement with sound, to the new space of an encounter with audio in the studio. As a group we will listen to, discuss, and work on issues of editing and composition both collectively and individually, using a multitrack editing environment (Reaper).

Nhà Sàn Collective - 15th floor, HNCC building, No. 1 Luong Yen, Hanoi

17:30

Found Footage South East Asia, Q&A with Merv Espina & Nguyễn Trinh Thi after screening

1. The Kalampag Tracking Agency: 30 years of Philippine Moving Image (67’ | Philippines | Various years / Various filmmakers, curated by Shireen Seno & Merv Espina)
Overcoming institutional and personal lapses to give attention to little-seen works—some quite recent, some surviving loss and decomposition – “Kalampag Tracking Agency” collects loose parts in motion, a series of bangs, or kalampag in Tagalog, assembled by individual strengths and how they might resonate off each other and a contemporary audience. Featuring some of the most striking films and videos from the Philippines and its diaspora, this is an initiative that continues to navigate the uncharted topographies of Filipino alternative and experimental moving image practice.

2. Eleven Men (28’, 2016, Nguyễn Trinh Thi)
“Eleven Men” is composed of scenes from a range of Vietnamese classic narrative films featuring the same central actress, Nhu Quynh. Spanning three decades of her legendary acting career, most of the appropriated movies — from 1966 to 2000 — were produced by the state-owned Vietnam Feature Film Studio.
The film’s text was adapted from “Eleven Sons”, a short story by Franz Kafka first published in 1919, which begins with a father’s declaration: “I have eleven sons”, then describes each one of them in acute and ironic detail. Transposing the father’s voice of Kafka’s story, the film begins with a woman stating: “I have eleven men”.

Goethe Institute - 56-58 Nguyen Thai Hoc, Hanoi

19:00

Selection from Hamburg International Short Film Festival (curated by Birgit Glombitza)

In her program “Sense and Sensibility” she walks us through an international choice of filmic experiments which deconstruct narration, production or even the film picture itself with self-reflecting skepticism. These productions mostly by European filmmakers were successful at the film festivals from Rotterdam, Hamburg, Oberhausen to Tampere. They won prices or turned out to be coin a new way of making short films. However, there is- we admit a considerable level of Eurocentrism.
+ Thu 9/11

Goethe Institute - 56-58 Nguyen Thai Hoc, Hanoi

09:30 - 16:30

Symposium: Time, Space, and the Visceral in Southeast Asian Cinema

Focus of the Hanoi symposium: on experimental filmmaking, curating, film education and activism From 2016 to 2018, the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas will extend its biennial conferences with a series of workshops designed to facilitate dialogue across critical and creative practice. Beginning with a conference held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in July 2016, the network will bring together filmmakers, scholars, students, and the general public in subsequent events in Los Angeles, California, Hanoi, Vietnam, and Glasgow, Scotland.

19:00

Selection from Hamburg International Short Film Festival (part 2)

“Time is Short” is the title of the second program. A collection of films where the spectators views, the artistry of the camera-eye and the film itself are presented as illusion machines. These are short films where cinema confronts itself and with its own phantasies. We talk about illogical synchronicities and impossible rotation equipment, flying cities that were built through faulty 3D-printer and about tricks with gravity. We come across shellfish which settle overcrowded landscapes with an ethnographic perspective, we meet topside-turned skies and a cineastic kinetics which only in short films.

Nhà Sàn Collective - 15th floor, HNCC building, No. 1 Luong Yen, Hanoi

17:30

Realities: World Premiere of 4 Doclab films (70’, 2017, produced by Jamie Maxtone-Graham) Q&A with filmmakers after screening

1. Summer siesta: 6th hour counting from dawn (15’, 2017, Nguyễn Hải Yến)
In the midsummer of a tropical country, persons are taking their siesta, persons dream of time, nothing but the tranquility of time.

2. A death is a death is not a death (14’, 2017, Nguyễn Thị Huệ)
A vast rice field. An announcement. A hopeless escape. A death.

3. Untitled.mp4 (15’, 2017, Lê Xuân Tiến)
A found footage film with material and videos appropriated from the Internet, exploring different scenarios that once occurred, are occurring or could possibly occur.

4. Frame of traces (23′, 2017, Ngô Thị Thanh)
A landscape floats on traces of reality. There will be portraits and lives (un-)framed by sounds, images, voices that constantly stretch and vanish in a fragile flow of signification. It does not mean the film represents the unpresentable. 23 minutes of (de-)constructed time, space, concepts, and art forms, the film echoes innermost feelings.

20:00

The Mengkerang Project (90', 2013-2015, Sow Yee Au) Q&A with artist after screening

The Mengkerang Project was initiated by Au Sow Yee from 2013 to 2015. Through these series of works, Sow Yee reexamine the intermingling psychic geology and historical borders of Malaysia, through an imaginary place, Mengkerang.

Au Sow Yee was born and grew up in Malaysia, she now based in Taipei and Kuala Lumpur. Sow Yee attained her M.F.A degree from San Francisco Art Institute (U.S.A) majored in experimental filmmaking and Taipei National University of the Arts, majored in New Media Arts. Her works focuses mainly in questioning, exploring as well as expanding the relation between images, image making, history, politics and power, through video installation and other mediums. Sow Yee’s recent works focus on re-imagined history of Malaysia, South-east Asia and it’s related region from perceptions and ideologies bounded by the Cold War. Meanwhile, she also continue her interest in image making mechanism, creating live cinema performance using self-made mechanism and mechanical film projectors. Sow Yee’s works were exhibited in MMCA (Seoul), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), HKW (Berlin), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai) etc. Sow Yee was the co-founder and co-curator for KLEX (Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival) in 2010, 2011 and 2016. She is also one of the guest writer for online magazine No Man’s Land and co-founded Kuala Lumpur’s Rumah Attap Library and Collective in 2017.

+ Fri 10/11

Nhà Sàn Collective - 15th floor, HNCC building, No. 1 Luong Yen, Hanoi

11:00 - 17:00

In a green island (20' loop, 5 channel video installation, 2017, Jamie Maxtone-Graham)

With a voyeuristic camera and an ambient sound environment, the five screens frame individuals within a landscape that they at once inhabit and are yet not conscious of. The bodies, male and female, can be seen as both a natural part of the landscape and vulnerable within it. There is disquiet in the ambience of it.

Goethe Institute - 56-58 Nguyen Thai Hoc, Hanoi

09:00 - 16:30

Symposium: Time, Space, and the Visceral in Southeast Asian Cinema (cont.)

Focus of the Hanoi symposium: on experimental filmmaking, curating, film education and activism From 2016 to 2018, the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas will extend its biennial conferences with a series of workshops designed to facilitate dialogue across critical and creative practice. Beginning with a conference held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in July 2016, the network will bring together filmmakers, scholars, students, and the general public in subsequent events in Los Angeles, California, Hanoi, Vietnam, and Glasgow, Scotland.

17:00

Selection from Hamburg International Short Film Festival (part 3)

In the third program, “The Universe and Me”, German film and video artists discuss national and sociocultural sensitivities. In “Alienation” which received many awards teenagers talk about tricks to undermine media-pedagogic rules or to avoid curfews set by their parents. They come across as animated pimpled monsters or YouTube-make-up-princesses, who are preoccupied with their own and the other sex behind giggling and posing. In “The Bear” and “Satanic Jungle” we feel the unease about our own culture, the left-liberal saturation of a small family and deep rooted paternalism of a nation. The video artist Björn Melhus presents in his travesties (“I´m not the Enemy”) traumatized post-war soldiers who quote from American war and hero films. In “Symbolic Threat” the street art duo Wermke/Leinkauf turn Brooklyn Bridge into a state of political emergency.

19:00

Hanoi DocFest 2017 Opening Ceremony

20:00

Screening and Q&A with filmmakers

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Flat Sunlight (2016, Lena Bui)

Giang visits her aunt Muoi in Tien Giang for the summer to give her mother personal space and time to sort things out.
The slow rhythm of countryside life, children's games, and close relationship within the neighborhood help Giang forget about her personal troubles and the hot Mekong sun. Seeing her 60-year-old aunt constantly busy with farm work, Giang decides to help out.
The film develops through Giang's perspective, weaving documentary footages with a fictional storyline. Through Giang and aunt Muoi's developing relationship we get a sense of the slow and drawn-out rhythm of life in the rural South of Vietnam, the close contact between human and animals, the switch from traditional methods to reliance on industrial feed, concerns surrounding food safety, and the perception and interests of a typical farming household in the Mekong Delta. The film also introduces a new angle into the relationship between human and animals, and the inseparable ties between life and death.

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Drowning Dew (2017, Đỗ Văn Hoàng & Trương Quế Chi)

'Drowning Dew' is an artwork that, depending on the occasion, can be considered as series of experimental films if it is set up as one-monitor consecutive screening, or as video installation with 6-channel projected structure. The film is a critical yet poetically fictional depiction of rapid changes of environment, landscape, human habits and society in Central Highlands of Vietnam. The film series contain 6 mini pieces that are loosely based on Jrai myth of posthumous metamorphosis. The myth acts as an open narrative framework, and as allegory of inevitable transformations of the area during this modernization and industrialization, which occur also in different regions in Southeast Asia.
This is a work of Art Labor and created in collaboration with 2 filmmakers Truong Que Chi and Do Van Hoang, who have individually conducted researches on landscape, religion, ethnography and aesthetics in Central Highlands for long time. This work will premier at Centre Georges Pompidou in October 2017 within Cosmopolis exhibition.

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Summer Siesta: 6th hour counting from dawn (2017, Nguyễn Hải Yến)

In the midsummer of a tropical country, persons are taking their siesta, persons dream of time, nothing but the tranquility of time.

+ Sat 11/11

Goethe Institute - 56-58 Nguyen Thai Hoc, Hanoi

10:00 - 12:00

Portrait (part 1) screening and Q&A with filmmakers

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Hospital Apartment (2017, Nguyễn Thanh Vân)

A group of people coming from different regions of Vietnam live in the same slumpdog to cure their children's illnesses. Their life is a struggle between a lack of material, physical health and emotional pressure... The film depicts a life of those who relentlessly fight against sickness.

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The Gifts (2017, Nguyễn Thị Thanh Huyền)

Many people come to Inner Space, a non-profit center that helps people enrich their inner lives, to find ways to cope with and heal the hurt that they are having. The film listens to the people and their stories.

17:00 - 19:00

Portrait (part 2) screening and Q&A with filmmakers

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March 23rd (2017, Phạm Thị Hảo)

This is a story about a family on Kham Thien street, Hanoi. They have been waiting for their son to be shortly out of prison. 18 years away from the family and the normal life has created gaps in a person's life that are hardly fulfilled.

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The Turtle Slide (2016, Kim Đức)

``Cầu trượt con rùa`` là bộ phim tài liệu 35 phút về hành trình của Judith Hansen, người đi khoả lấp giấc mơ của bà xây dựng những chiếc cầu trượt ở Hà Nội - một thủ đô náo nhiệt nhưng thiếu trầm trọng các khu vui chơi dành cho trẻ em.

20:00 - 22:00

On the Endless Road (2015, Síu Phạm) Q&A with filmmaker after screening

A documentary-fiction tracks down an old hippy dead-end, final journey…
On the highlands of Northern Vietnam, an old white-man travels on his wretched motorbike, makes friends with a young well-off local couple who has a flying cam. When the old man looses everything, he comes back to the grandmother’s house of his new local friend, but the couple leaves and let him with the old woman and her niece, a Vietnamese school-girl, 10 years-old. The flying cam hits an eye injuring the old man who hopes to stay in this place, to help the little girl for writing an English poem, but the police tells him to leave. We don’t know where will be the old man, is he dead or not on the road?
on the endless road 3on the endless road 1on the endless road 2on the endless road 4

Nhà Sàn Collective - 15th floor, HNCC building, No. 1 Luong Yen, Hanoi

13:00

Inside Outside, Q&A with filmmaker Doan Hong Le after screening

1. Moon Over Da Nang (15’, 2015, dir. Bjorn Melhus)
Towards the end of the 1960s 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.

2. My Father the Last Communist (69’, 2016, dir. Đoàn Hồng Lê)
The director’s father is now in the beginning of Alzheimer. He forgets what’s happening in the present, but remembers the memories in far past. The present life is going on, but he stops with memories of his time.
In the last days of his life, he’s struggling to keep his pure communist ideology, although the reality in Vietnam today is very different from what he imagined when he joined Revolution 70 years ago. It’s a tragedy of his generation who dedicated their lives to fighting the wars against France and America. This is a story about a disappearing spirit of the communist generation and the crisis of faith in Vietnam today.

15:00

Back to the Future - Q&A with filmmakers after screening

1. The Man Who Build Cambodia (37’, 2016, dir. Christopher Rompre)
“The Man Who Build Cambodia” is a narrative documentary exploring the life of Vann Molyvann, an architect whose work came to represent a new identity for a country emerging from independence, and whose incredible story encompasses Cambodia’s turbulent journey as a modern nation.
In Cambodia’s post-independence period Molyvann had been at the centre of a renaissance, developing a distinctive architectural style, New Khmer Architecture, that completely changed the face of Cambodia.
Then in 1970, at his creative peak, Cambodia’s political landscape disintegrates, forcing him to flee as the Khmer Rouge plunges the country into genocide and civil war. Finally returning in the 1990s, Molyvann finds a different country than the one he had left. He’s marginalized from public life and many of his works are destroyed or neglected.
Today, like many countries is Asia, Cambodia is developing rapidly and unevenly. Nearly 90, the film follows Vann Molyvann as he reflects on the country he’s put so much of himself into.
At the heart of The Man Who Built Cambodia is Vann Molyvann’s lifelong engagement with the identity of the Khmer people, and his attempt to create a unique architectural style that gives modern expression to that identity.

2. From Now On (34’, 2017, dir. Vi Đỗ)
“From Now On” attempts to trace back to the history of Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong and the relationship between politics and the dilemma of refugee crisis with the correspondent immigration policy of Hong Kong towards Vietnamese nationals today. The film starts with a secretly recorded conversation between the filmmaker and an Immigration officer, which the filmmaker was hassled by a typical bureaucratic manner. The film unfolds a historical narrative of Vietnamese boatpeople, from early 70s until the year 2000.
The filmmaker conducts interviews and conversations with Vietnamese refugees and non-refugees, as well as Hong Kong authorities, and scholars. The film, then, is a personal way of re-assessing the institutional definition of “refugee” throughout socio-political conflict of history. The film is also an expression of the complicated relationship between the filmmaker and Hong Kong, the place she wanted to call home.

3. Everyday’s the Seventies (15’, 2018, dir. Nguyễn Trinh Thi)

17:00

Death in Arizona (77’, 2014, dir. Tin Dirdamal) Q&A with filmmaker after screening

“Death in Arizona” is a futuristic documentary of lost love and a tale of a dying civilization. It is an autobiographical portrayal of a man who returns to his lost love’s empty apartment in pursuit of answers. The distant voices of a tribe in Arizona that survived a meteorite strike make their way into the third story apartment of this obscure Bolivian city.
+ Sun 12/11

Nhà Sàn Collective - 15th floor, HNCC building, No. 1 Luong Yen, Hanoi

13:00

Absent Without Leave (83', 2016, dir. Lau Kek Haut)

They sacrificed their lives fighting for the independence of their country, but their stories remain untold for 60 years.
The story begins with a man’s portrait, which has been hanging for more than 30 years in an old wooden house where I was born and grew up in Perak, Malaysia. It’s long become a taboo that my families do not talk about this man, not even to bring up his name or his past. Eventually I found out he is my grandfather, who sacrificed his life fighting for Malaysia’s independence and decolonisation, but his and his comrades’ stories are excluded from history. This documentary set out to unveil the mysteries.

14:30

Sensory Ethnographic Lab SEL 2 (85’) Q&A with filmmakers after screening

1. Demolition (62′, 2008, dir. J.P. Sniadecki)
A very strong but rarely seen earlier work by JP Sniadecki, who later made FOREIGN PARTS (with Véréna Paravel), PEOPLE’S PARK (with Libbie Cohn), THE IRON MINISTRY, and most recently EL MAR LA MAR (with Joshua Bonetta), Chaiqian (Demolition) is a portrait of migrant labor, urban space, and ephemeral relationships in the center of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in western China.
Một tác phẩm rất vững nhưng trước giờ ít trình chiếu của JP Sniadecki, người sau này đạo diễn Các Bộ Phận Lạ (với Véréna Paravel), Công Viên Công (với Libbie Cohn), Nội Các Sắt và gần đây nhất, El Mar La Mar (với Joshua Bonetta), Chaiqian (Phá Dỡ) là một bức chân dung về lao động di cư, không gian đô thị, và các mối quan hệ liên tục biến tan ở trung tâm Thành Đô, thủ phủ của tỉnh Tứ Xuyên phía tây Trung Quốc.

2. Single Stream (23’, 2014, Pawel Wojtasik, Toby Kim Lee & Ernst Karel)
“Single Stream” takes a close look at the problem of waste, through a visual and sonic exploration of a recycling facility. The title refers to the “single stream” method of recycling in which all types of recyclables are initially gathered together, and sorted later at a specialized facility. With Single Stream, viewers enter one of the largest of these materials recovery facilities in the US. Inside a cavernous building, a vast machine complex runs like clock-work, sorting a steady stream of glass, metal, paper and plastic carried on conveyor belts criss-crossing the space, dotted with workers in neon vests. The interwoven movements of human and machine produce sounds and images that are overwhelming, but also beautiful, and even revelatory. Blurring the line between observation and abstraction, Single Stream is a meditation on our society’s culture of excess and its consequences.

17:00

We Don't Care About The Music Anyway (80’, 2009, Cédric Dupire & Gaspard Kuentz)

“We Don’t Care About The Music Anyway” is a documentary film associating and confronting the work of 8 musicians from Tokyo’s new music scene with the Japanese society. “Rather than a film about music, we like to think of “We Don’t Care..” as a film about sound and its perception” say directors CédricDupire and Gaspard Kuentz. How else to approach Tokyo’s world renowned avant-garde music scene? The amplified sound of a controlled heartbeat; the screech of an electric cello played with ferocity; turntablism at its most esoteric; walls of guitar drones over 8-bit soundscapes: these are the points where a diverse, ultra-modern cityscape meets ancient traditions in creative youths.

Heritage Space library, 1st floor Dolphin Plaza, 6 Nguyễn Hoàng/28 Trần Bình, Mỹ Đình 2, Hanoi

18:30 - 20:30

On the Endless Road (2015, Síu Phạm) Q&A with filmmaker after screening

A documentary-fiction tracks down an old hippy dead-end, final journey…
On the highlands of Northern Vietnam, an old white-man travels on his wretched motorbike, makes friends with a young well-off local couple who has a flying cam. When the old man looses everything, he comes back to the grandmother’s house of his new local friend, but the couple leaves and let him with the old woman and her niece, a Vietnamese school-girl, 10 years-old. The flying cam hits an eye injuring the old man who hopes to stay in this place, to help the little girl for writing an English poem, but the police tells him to leave. We don’t know where will be the old man, is he dead or not on the road?
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Goethe Institute - 56-58 Nguyen Thai Hoc, Hanoi

10:00 - 12:00

Portrait (part 3) Q&A with filmmakers after screening

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Dedicated to Grandpa Dieu (2016, Nguyễn Hiền Anh)

This documentary depicts the everyday life of an elderly person, Mr. Dieu, in busy Hanoi city. He leads a simple life in a modest house with a blue wooden door on a small corner of a busy street. The documentary focuses on Mr. Dieu – a man with strong ambition - who used to work as a freelance interpreter at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in the mid-1960s. He works very hard, translating books he likes, but he has never tried to publish any of them himself.``

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The Loner (2017, Hoàng Việt Đức)

The Loner is a documentary film about an angle of a guitarist's life - Thanh Da Nang. He has a special aptitude and passion for music, to the extent that he is willing to sacrifice his family life for music. The journey of this film is also a story of a middle-aged man lost and struggling with this life.``

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Huong Gau's Kitchen (2017, Trần Thị Huyền Trang)

The movie depicts the life of a young graduate who made the decision to come back to her hometown to start a business instead of staying in the city. With her passion for baking, she decided to work as an online baker.

18:00 - 19:00

Then & Now (part 1)

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Das Gestell (2017, Philip Widmann)


A Japanese philosopher writes a letter to a famous German colleague. He asks the German to advise the Japanese people how to deal with the permeation of modern life by technology. More than 50 years later, the same issues are being discussed among academics and aspiring engineers. It is hard to grasp how humans and technology continue to coexist. Resorting to biographical trivia, mythological histories and the recounting of dreams is not helping them to see these issues any clearer. In the grainy images of the film, landscapes from an uncertain time appear, occasionally flooded by water and a cacophony of brass players. The uncontrollable finds its ways into a world that tries to minimise risks and thus creates new dangers. (Das Gestell)

19:00

Then & Now (part 2) - DocLab Alumni Party: A Special Event

DocLab’s classic workshop with a humble title “Basic Filmmaking” has arrived at its 9th edition. It has been the homeplace of many outstanding independent filmmakers since its creation. On the occasion that another one of these classic workshops is about to come to an end, we would like to invite everyone: every alumni of the past, present, and future to come and celebrate this wonderful workshop, to connect and to reconnect, and to listen to the many stories that happened during the process, the ups and the downs, the tears and the joys in this part of town.