International Feature Film Competition
In a remote Vietnamese village, an elderly Rục grandmother cares for her grandchildren while sharing fragments of a language at risk of disappearing. Born in a cave more than sixty years ago, she now moves between memory and the present, visited by dreams of her late mother calling her home. Shot on 16mm and made in close collaboration with the Rục community, the film is a lyrical meditation on loss, heritage, and the quiet transmission of memory across generations.
In a remote Vietnamese village, an elderly Rục grandmother cares for her grandchildren while sharing fragments of a language at risk of disappearing. Born in a cave more than sixty years ago, she now moves between memory and the present, visited by dreams of her late mother calling her home. Shot on 16mm and made in close collaboration with the Rục community, the film is a lyrical meditation on loss, heritage, and the quiet transmission of memory across generations.
In a remote Vietnamese village, an elderly Rục woman remembers being born in a cave more than sixty years ago. As seasons turn, she tends to her grandchildren and threads their days with the sounds of a language on the verge of vanishing, names of plants, and lullabies that carry entire worlds. Cooking fires, river water, and forest paths trace a map of belonging, while dreams return like tides: her late mother’s voice still calling her home across the porous line between past and present. In gestures as modest as washing a bowl or braiding hair, memory endures; the everyday becomes a vessel for what might otherwise slip away.
Directed by Nicolas Graux and Trương Minh Quý, ‘Hair, Paper, Water…’ is a meditative journey through remembrance, loss, and oral tradition. Shot on 16mm in close collaboration with the Rục community, the film listens as much as it sees, allowing myth, language, and landscape to overlap and breathe. The film is both an act of preservation and a cinematic offering to those who live between silence and song. It invites us to witness the fragile resilience of inheritance and how culture is carried hand to hand, voice to voice, even as certain worlds fade from view.
Directed by Nicolas Graux and Trương Minh Quý, ‘Hair, Paper, Water…’ is a meditative journey through remembrance, loss, and oral tradition. Shot on 16mm in close collaboration with the Rục community, the film listens as much as it sees, allowing myth, language, and landscape to overlap and breathe. The film is both an act of preservation and a cinematic offering to those who live between silence and song. It invites us to witness the fragile resilience of inheritance and how culture is carried hand to hand, voice to voice, even as certain worlds fade from view.
