VIET AND NAM (2024)

Trong lòng đất

Vietnamese history is excavated, literally and figuratively, in director Trương Minh Quý’s astonishing new work, a love story staged in subterranean corridors and haunted by spectres of unreconciled war. Set in rural Vietnam at the turn of the 21st century, the film centres on the clandestine romance between two young coal miners, Viet (Đào Duy Bảo Định) and Nam (Phạm Thanh Hải), for whom intimacy occurs only in tunnelled chambers beneath the earth—twinkling anthracite encircling their bodies like sunken stars. Their time together is fleeting. Nam has paid a trafficker to smuggle him out of Vietnam, but not before accompanying his mother on a pilgrimage south to locate the remains of his father, one of untold “missing martyrs” whose bodies were never recovered after the war. Banned in Vietnam for its “negative view” of the nation, this sensual, tenebrous work, shot in granular 16mm, is a triumph of vision and historical unforgetting.