Chuyen moi nha
Pham Ngoc Lan
Vietnam | 2011 | 9 min
Language : Vietnamese
Subtitle : English
How do you portray a society that is largely invisible? Using fixed shots brought to life by the sound of Vietnamese state radio, Pham Ngoc Lan observes urban life and transforms his characters, caught at a given instant of their daily existence, into ventriloquist’s dummies, paradoxically resistant to the official discourse which infiltrates talk-shows and popular radio soaps.
How do you portray a society that is largely invisible? In the short passing-out film he made at the DOCLAB in Hanoi, Pham Ngoc Lan adopts a simple formula, on the verge of photography: eight rigorously framed static shots featuring anonymous Vietnamese from all social backgrounds: the passengers on a bus, a workman, a fisherman, an intellectual, an old man and his dog, a mother and daughter, listening to talk-shows, pop songs, poems or plays. These characters, shown in discrete spaces, are nonetheless united, or at least “bathed”, by the waves of Vietnamese state radio. Caught for a moment in their daily lives, the heroes of Chuyen moi nha are like ventriloquist’s dummies. Their partial immobility seems to confirm what an announcer is saying (“the history of one person can be the experience of us all”) and the fact that they are spoken. But the stories that pass through them give their presence an unexpected weight, as if the opacity of the bodies exposed in this way opened the doors of their imagination to the viewer.
Emmanuel Chicon
Translation BMP Translations