Hair, Paper, Water… [+leggi anche:
recensione
intervista: Trương Minh Quý
scheda film], directed by Trương Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux, is a deceptively modest film that’s attracted a lot of attention in the latter part of this year, first premiering in Locarno, where it won the Golden Leopard for the Filmmakers of the Present section, and then travelling to prime berths at the New York Film Festival and BFI London. DocLisboa last week celebrated Trương’s still-young career with a full retrospective, showing the breadth of his work and the eerie power of his image-making, whether in a narrative-driven mode like the Cannes-premiering Viet and Nam [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], or with his evident nous for collaboration, working with Graux in a more ethnographic fashion. Cineuropa sat down with Trương in Lisbon to take stock of his success in the festival world, and to gain insight on how he crafted his most recent, beguiling work.

(L'articolo continua qui sotto - Inf. pubblicitaria)

Cineuropa: How did you initially meet Hair, Paper, Water…’s protagonist, Madame Hâu?
Trương Minh Quý: During the research for my last documentary, The Tree House [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], I realised I wanted to do something about the Rục people - the idea that they made their homes in caves was, somehow, very rich. So, I went to the the area where most of them live, along the Vietnam-Laos border, to search for a character. That’s how I first met Madame Hâu.

During The Tree House’s shooting, I asked her how she would return to the cave, if the valley were flooded? She said she would travel by boat, although the cave is actually underwater, which sounded very abstract to me. There's something so mysterious, so beautiful about that. So for Hair, Paper, Water…, Nicolas and I wanted to create that imagery with her.

Can you talk about how the film fuses text and image through its inter-titles? They make a direct attempt to illustrate the Rục language.
I’ve also used them in my previous films. But in this film specifically, we wondered if it would be too simplistic, having the image shown alongside its linguistic form. Yet during the process, we realised the connection between the Madame Hâu and her grandchildren, one of whom moved to Saigon - we followed her there to shoot when the former visits for the first time, which was not our initial plan. There’s this convention of moving from where you were born, going to the cities - like everyone, actually, on this planet - to earn money There’s this risk of forgetting your own ancestral culture, especially when the wider Rục language is very fragile.

The captions create a narrative flow and structure for the film; otherwise, it would be very fragmented. We often take each word, in any language, as something like a brick to build a sentence. Most of the time, we overlook the words themselves.

A strong connection between Viet and Nam and Hair, Paper, Water… is the interest in subterranean spaces - the mines in the former, and Madame Hâu’s cave in the latter. It suggests what’s hidden or to be unearthed in Vietnamese society and the landscape.
Here at DocLisboa, they’re showing my previous work, and it’s very clear they’ve always appeared in my films - I don't know why, but it's important. Because simply, I feel like the characters myself - we never really belong to a certain place. In storytelling terms, I like to create a sense of distance - whether of time or space, or looking into both the future and the past.

With The Tree House, Viet and Nam and now Hair, Paper, Water… receiving lots of exposure on the circuit, do you feel audiences, critics and programmers gradually reaching your wavelength, and perceiving you as an “auteur”? Has the feedback and praise impacted how you might work in the future?
I understand that there are certain expectations, especially if you're in Cannes with a film like Viet and Nam. Still, I try my best not to forget when I was making films out of nothing, like with my parents in my first feature The City of Mirrors. Because there are always stimuli around me in life. You can always create something meaningful out of minimal things. I shouldn't forget that, even if I migrate to a bigger production, with a lot of money.