Hair, Paper, Water… feels like one of the first recent documentaries to be infused with the spirit of Duolingo, the much-loved language-learning mobile app. Infamous also for the badgering notifications of its green owl mascot, it knows language acquisition is only possible with insistent practice; Hair, Paper, Water…’s lead figure, Mrs Cao Thị Hậu, is a similarly adamant instructor, hopeful that her grandson Cao Xuân Doanh can master her ancestral Ruc language, as well as read and write in Vietnamese and English, with his independent future looming. In the feature, co-directed by Nicolas Graux and Trương Minh Quý, the latter of whom is growing into one of his generation’s most prominent Vietnamese auteurs, the Ruc language dots the characters’ voice-over and the surprisingly heavy use of inter-titles, allowing us to witness Doanh’s educational development whilst the film’s other beautiful elements contribute to our own. Premiering at Locarno, the doc was awarded the Golden Leopard in the Filmmakers of the Present Competition (see the news).

This film is the more casual, artisanal work of artists who are inherently technically adept. With a vast existing familiarity with the locale (and Hậu appearing in the prior Trương documentary The Tree House [+lee también:
crítica
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Inventorying is a narrative strategy: as well as rudimentary nouns in Ruc, such as those in the film’s title, we get the remnants of a folk healing culture, with medicinal leaves such as the Chòn plant celebrated as remedies for postpartum maladies and even COVID. They all get a quick-fire, yet loving, close-up insert shot, and the tactile sound design by Ernst Karel means we can almost hear the green-hued images and visually perceive the audio. Graux and Trương also convey the fact that Hậu leads a uniquely simple, if self-sufficient, life – her labour hours, despite her increasing age, put to gathering food for her own sustenance, and each day typically resembling the next.

Lest that seem slender for a feature, the directors build out their storytelling into Hậu’s generational bonds, and how her family responsibilities, seen against the slipstream of her past memories, cruelly and eloquently evoke the passage of time. The 16 mm photography takes on a suitably dangerous hue as it peers into the precipice of a cave, where indeed Hậu was born as one of nine children, and where her family lived; by contrast, two of her older granddaughters live in Saigon (which she travels to at the film’s opening for only the first time) and get by through dangerous factory work. Experimental documentaries like this typically emphasise hands-on, material activity to the exclusion of all else, and muse on their participants’ ultimate unknowability; here, we get a more delicate sense of lives conducted at the margins, outside history and even conventional sociability, yet if we really look, they are composed of as much richness and fraught depth as anyone else’s.

Hair, Paper, Water… is a production by Belgium, France and Vietnam, staged by Dérives and Petit Chaos. It was co-produced by WIP - Wallonie Image Production and Lagi Films. Its international sales are overseen by Lights On.