Hanoi (VNA) – Director Pham Thu Hang has been honoured with the Best Director Awardat the 29th Singapore International Film Festival for herdocumentary film “Mua Cat Vong” (The Future Cries Beneath Our Soil).
The film is about five men enjoying an odd friendship in Vietnam’s centralQuang Tri province, a site still bearing the scars of war.
Thanh, Hoang, Phuong, Dinh and Loc,like many around them, carry scars from the Vietnam War, both in body and mind.They work in the gold mines surrounding their village, or search for landminesalong paths previously used by tanks, in order to make ends meet.
As they wait out the winter withsongs, wine stolen from Loc’s wife, and musings about youth and their ownsurvival, they are haunted by the detonations of bombs being excavated from thevillage’s soil. Together they reminisce about the war that has defined theboundaries of their lives, though they never fought it.
Pham Thu Hang’s moving documentarydeftly captures the dark shadow of war and death, present in even everydayconversation and simple gestures.
Meanwhile in the category of MostPromising Project, another female film-maker of Vietnam, Dao Thi Minh Trang, washonoured with her film project entitled “Never been Kissed.”
This is one of the 10 projectsselected for the Southeast Asian Film Lab, a programme helping young filmmakers in Southeast Asia to develop their very first works.-VNA