October 25, 2019, By Vietnam Weekly
Being a film fan in Vietnam is tough. Clean, modern cinemas are all over the place and you can see an IMAX movie for about US$7, but the quality of domestic productions remains extremely spotty, while almost no European/Latin American movies are released and we tend to only get Hollywood's action blockbusters or animated family movies. This time of year back in the US is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to movie releases, while the big foreign releases showing at CGV right now are Maleficent (pass) and Gemini Man (definitely pass). The one cinema win we got this year was the release of the stunning Bong Joon-ho film Parasite over the summer, while it only recently premiered in the US. (Side note: go see it immediately.)
It recently became clear why Vietnamese movies still struggle so often to reach the heights of cinema from other countries. Rom, a drama about a young bookie hustling on the streets of Saigon, won the top prize at the prestigious Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) earlier this month. Instead of being celebrated here in Vietnam, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism fined HKFilm, the production company behind the movie, nearly US$2,000 for not editing out violent scenes as had been requested, meaning it hadn't been licensed for release.
HKFilm had actually asked the BIFF organizers to pull Rom from the competition since they knew about the licensing problems, but it was screened anyway, to rave reviews. The culture ministry also gave HKFilm 10 days to destroy the copy of the movie it sent to the festival. (I get the sense they still think all movies are made on actual film.)
Rom was the passion project of a promising young filmmaker named Tran Dung Thanh Huy and based on his terrific 2013 short film 16:30. Huy spent years making Rom, and it will now likely never be released in Vietnam, or at least not in its full version, which is a damn shame as it sounds extremely good and is exactly the sort of gritty, real-world cinema missing here.
Tuoi Tre has this good piece on how censorship double-standards makes it very hard for Vietnamese filmmakers to compete against Hollywood fare, and it's a good point: movies like Deadpool and Joker are shown here (with the most violent scenes cut, but still), while local directors are essentially not allowed to depict real life, warts and all. The powers-that-be are stuck in the 1970s (not in a good way), and that is suffocating creativity.
In other movie news, local cinemas pulled the Dreamworks animated film Abominable after viewers noticed China's infamous 'nine-dash line' on a map of Southeast Asia in a scene. It was co-produced with a Chinese film company. (And in other nine-dash line news, a car importer in northern Vietnam has brought in Chinese-made cars which feature the contested map in the navigation system of the vehicles, while the travel company Saigontourist was fined over US$2,000 for handing out promotional brochures featuring the line on a map.)
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