Minh Quý Trương, a filmmaker from Buôn Ma Thuột, Vietnam, began his artistic journey by attending film school but dropped out in 2008 to pursue independent filmmaking. His early exposure to cinema led him to participate in the Asian Film Academy and the Berlinale Talents program, which enhanced his passion for storytelling and filmmaking. Trương’s career blossomed with his early short films Déjà Vu (2014) and How Green Was the Calabash Garden (2016), each showing his talent for capturing complex emotions and mixing documentary and fictional storytelling. His first feature, The City of Mirrors: A Fictional Biography (2016), marked a turning point in his career, followed by The Tree House (2019), which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival. His previous works paved the way for his latest film, Việt and Nam.
Việt and Nam debuted in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, presenting Trương’s growing stature as a filmmaker. With this film he continued exploration of personal and political themes, where history and personal trauma intertwine in powerful and often haunting ways. The film is set against the backdrop of a coal mine, where its suffocating darkness and physical and emotional weight serve as both literal and metaphorical spaces for entrapment. Shot on 16mm film, Việt and Nam bears a tactile, almost ghostly quality, capturing a timeless sense of longing, loss, and hope. Trương’s deliberate choice of format, despite the logistical challenges in Vietnam, liberated him from the constraints of digital filmmaking, allowing him to trust his instincts and work closely with his cinematographer, Son Doan, to create a visual experience that draws the audience into the heart of the characters’ inner worlds.
The film will be screened at this year’s BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. Ahead of the festival, we had the privilege of sitting down with the filmmaker to discuss Việt and Nam in depth.
Cinematically speaking, I always like it when a certain landscape can embrace the future, present, and past, and we can see its timelessness in that landscape.
View of the Arts: Việt and Nam is shot on 16mm, a choice that brings a tactile, almost ghostly texture to the film. What drew you to this format, and how did it shape the film’s atmosphere and emotional weight?
Minh Quý Trương: Việt and Nam is my fourth film shot on Super 16mm film. The first was The Tree House (2019). The decision to use film stemmed from both curiosity and an adventurous spirit. Việtnam’s lack of analogue film infrastructure presented significant logistical challenges. In fact, on Việt and Nam some of the final rolls were accidentally X-rayed, creating an effect some viewers might notice (which luckily ,in a way, goes well with the atmosphere of those shots.) There is something inherently timeless in images captured on film, especially on 16mm. And this timeless feeling is what I would like to visualize in the film. Paradoxically, shooting on 16mm liberated me. It freed me from constantly checking the playback monitor. I had to trust my eyes, my fragile sensations, and of course, the cinematographer. And most of the time, the rushes turned out to be more beautiful than what was in my memory.
VOA: The film weaves together two distinct yet intertwined ghost stories – one rooted in historical trauma, the other in personal longing. How did you approach balancing these layers, ensuring they complemented rather than overshadowed one another?
MQT: I feel like in the most intimate moments of our personal lives, the “history” finds a way to appear in brief moments under various images, forms and sounds. In my films there are always multiple layers, narratives, and sometimes, there are tensions between them. Maybe I’m very gritty about life because I want to connect everything, to try to see life in a full view. In doing so, it means I have to bring different and at times paradoxical events, layers, times, characters, stories, approaches into one film. It only makes it difficult to try and balance and harmonize everything. But this way of telling stories has something to do with how I see and perceive life and people. I can say the way I see a person or event is somehow spiritual. I try to understand the present, of course. But I also try to understand the past and the future, and how everything relates together in this precise moment, in this encounter between me and them. So that point of view of life translates into the film. I think it also relates to my perception of documentary and fiction. From an outsider’s point-of-view, there are differences. But when I make a film, I don’t see that. So that’s whether this film or other films we can see there are layers of documentary narration and layers of fictional narration. The challenge for me as a filmmaker here is to blend them together.
VOA: The coal mines serve as both a physical and metaphorical space – suffocating yet strangely intimate. What were your visual and narrative intentions in using the mines as a central location? How did you collaborate with your cinematographer, Son Doan, to create this effect? Additionally, how did you envision the film’s relationship with both its natural and built environments?
MQT: Cinematically speaking, I always like it when a certain landscape can embrace the future, present, and past, and we can see its timelessness in that landscape. Here, it’s a small industrial town. I didn’t try to set up anything to make it look like it’s in the past. Everything in the film is almost as it is now. This overlap between the present and the past is already in reality and we try to capture that.
As a location, a mine carries an awareness of the environment because the coal industry has created a place that is polluted. Even the river is black with coal wastes. The coal mine also suggests something from a different era, something from the past that, in this place, still exists. The darkness in the coal mines is not a limitation for me, but on the contrary, it opens up our imagination precisely because we can’t see what lies outside of the lit zones in such a dark space. Thanks to the darkness, we are free to imagine that Việt and Nam are at the same time floating in outer space with twinkling stars that are coal dust particles.
We also see different kinds of landscapes, like forests, sea and mountains. They all carry memories, particularly for Nam, the character waiting and wanting to leave. For him, each landscape he sees might be for the last time. There is also a kind of trauma in some of the landscapes, like a field full of bomb craters. Even banal locations, such as the tapioca field, hold meaning as there could be the bodies of soldiers buried beneath the soil. So I wanted to approach nature with a sense of melancholy, as if it is being seen through the eyes of somebody who is close to these places. Even if at the same time it carries a sense of horror, whether due to the effects of industrial pollution or the remnants of the past hidden in the earth.
There is something inherently timeless in images captured on film, especially on 16mm. And this timeless feeling is what I would like to visualize in the film.
VOA: The intimacy between Việt and Nam is depicted with remarkable tenderness and authenticity. What was your process in working with the actors to create such a natural and deeply felt portrayal of love and desire?
MQT: Almost nobody in the cast had acted in a film before. Real life experiences and genuine presences are what I was searching for. They were incredibly patient with me and the filmmaking process. Two of them underwent various training and practices for several months. The characters of Việt and Nam need to appear ordinary, like any other workers, while simultaneously harboring a deeper complexity. When I saw Phạm Thanh Hải (Nam), his gaze and movements exuded a quiet determination, perfectly embodying a character who has chosen his path. Đào Duy Bảo Định (Việt), on the other hand, projects an air of patient endurance and softness, someone who can listen and observe the stories of others. And interestingly, their similar appearances contribute to the “mirror effect” I was aiming to achieve in the film. The very first test for two of them during the casting process was the kissing scene, which lasted for almost 3 minutes. They didn’t meet each other before the test, and I would like to see how spontaneously passionate they could be towards a stranger, and the result was better than I expected.
VOA: Much of the film is driven by absence – missing bodies, missing futures, and the ever-present possibility of separation. How did you approach storytelling in a way that made these absences feel as present as the characters themselves?
MQT: Absence and Presence, Inside the frame and Out of the frame, Darkness and Light… the film functions on these parallels. Sound paradox it is, for me these parallels are not like two lines running to infinity and never cross each other, but it is like when we look at the mirror and see the parallel reflection of our own face. They are two but one.
VOA: The film often embraces silence, giving the audience space to fully experience the weight of a moment. Could you share your approach to pacing and how you use the length of scenes to deepen emotion and meaning? Additionally, the theme of listening – of being attuned to another’s presence – permeates the film, especially in the poignant moment when Việt asks how he will hear when Nam is gone. How do you view sound as both a narrative and emotional tool in Việt and Nam?
MQT: What we see is limited by the frame, but what we hear enlarges our sensation. For example, the scenes with the explosion in the mine: We always see a limited frame — a group of miners waiting. Then we hear a huge explosion that brings the audience to imagine a very deep and large coal mine.
There are many silent moments between the characters in the film, during which they look at each other and feel the inner answers. This silent understanding is perhaps what moves me the most. The moments we feel understood without the need to explain our feelings. Yet interestingly, there are other moments when the characters really speak out their deep inner feelings and thoughts in a very lyrical and straightforward manner, for example the scene Nam speaks to his father in front of the cave.
There are two shots of complete silence, when the sound completely disappears and what we see is only landscape. I like the use of silence. I already used this in my previous film The Tree House (2019), when sound disappears and what we see is the image in silence. The silence is very strong. It creates this attachment to what we are seeing. It has something to do with the physical state of the audience because when it’s silent, suddenly what we hear is ourselves in the cinema. It creates an interesting sensation. When the sound comes back, the audience jumps back into the reality of where they are, which is the cinema.
For me the (long) duration is not what guarantees the rhythm of the film, but it is the intensity of what is felt inside the frame. Some shots in my film are very brief, but I believe they have pierced through the audience’s emotion. Some other shots linger, suggesting a certain mystery of what is unseen.
VOA: Việt and Nam explores themes of entrapment – historical, political, and personal – while also portraying a longing for escape that seems beyond reach. Do you believe there is any form of liberation within the film, or is its tragedy an unyielding force? Despite the melancholic tone, there are fleeting moments of joy – reckless yet undeniably alive. How significant were these moments of euphoria for you, and did you see them as a form of resistance to the film’s eventual tragedy?
MQT: From my perspective, it looks like a fairytale. Taking the ending scene for example, we know there’s something not real here. They’re in a coal mine, stuck. Then actually, they’re floating in the ocean. Over that, we hear the fairytale of a prince, who is exiled by his king to survive by himself, who manages to grow some watermelons and survives, hoping to one day return home. With the combination of the story, the music, the image at the end of something like a dream, everything all at once creates that dreamy feeling more than an image that was heavily realistic. There’s something about dreams and fantasy, about love, about hope to return home. And rising throughout the film is a poignant feeling – the kind that fills our heart when, on the last day, we face saying goodbye to a place or a person that we love or don’t love. With the last-day feeling, a thin ray of sunlight on a dusty wall radiates an unbearable melancholy. With the last-day feeling, a casual look becomes a longing gaze. With this film, I would like to take the audience on a deeper dive into the complexity of the human soul where we could feel and listen to the faint vibrations of an unspoken spirit: being there, in the immense sea, we strongly feel that at the heart of the force to leave lies the aspiration to return. To return to see home anew, and to say: “Mom, I’m home.”
Written and interviewed by Maggie Gogler
Featured image courtesy of Daniel Seiffert
The BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival will take place at BFI Southbank from 19th-30th March. Tickets are on sale now via bfi.org.uk/flare.
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