Hair, Paper, Water…
A woman regales her grandchildren with her wisdom and stories, a gift of language with which they can navigate life.
Description
Cao Thị Hậu and her family live in Vietnam surrounded by rolling green hills enveloped in mist. Here, she sits with her grandchildren tending to their pains and spinning stories of the cave in Quảng Bình where she was born. Folk tales, bees, tigers, and home remedies all braid themselves into her fables and the wisdom she imparts. As a storyteller and one of the few remaining indigenous Rục people, Hậu is the keeper of memories and knowledge. She is the steward of a fast-disappearing language, and it is her duty to fill the lives of her descendants with her words as she prepares to answer that last call from the faraway cave. Using Bolex cameras and a lush sound design, filmmakers Nicolas Graux and Trương Minh Quy deliver a visual treat along with an invitation to enter Hậu’s extraordinary world. —Bedatri Choudhury
Biographies
Belgian filmmaker Nicolas Graux graduated from the Institute of Media Arts in 2012 with a master’s degree in Film Directing. He made his feature debut with the documentary Century of Smoke (2019). His short films include Boy with the Devil (2012), The Flat Colony (2013), After Dawn (2017), and Porcupine (2023). He is currently working on his first narrative feature The Poet’s Son.
Trương Minh Quy was born in Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam, and is an alumnus of the 2012 Asian Film Academy (Busan International Film Festival) and 2016 Berlinale Talents. He made his feature debut with The City of Mirrors: A Fictional Biography (2015), followed by The Tree House (2019). Among his short films are Someone Is Going to Forest (2013), Mars in the Well (2014), Déjà Vu (2014), The City of Mirrors (2015), How Green Was the Calabash Garden (2016), and Porcupine (2023).
