Viet and Nam

Official Selection, 2024 Cannes Film Festival

In the year 2001, Vietnam still has unanswered questions from the war. Television broadcasts crowdsource information to locate the gravesites of missing soldiers and assist families unable to grieve without their loved ones’ remains. In the countryside, there looms an ever-present danger in the hundreds of thousands of unexploded bombs that remain buried underground. And nationwide, economic hardship continues to drive waves of migration westward.

This is the backdrop under which two coal miners, Viet and Nam, engage in an illicit romance. Their relationship unfolds in discreet corners — hands held under a dinner table, bodies dripped in sweat entangled under the relative safety of a coal mine. Yet, tied as he is to Nam and his mother who dreams of her missing husband’s burial site, Viet still longs for a life elsewhere, planning to escape the country by boat.

Director Trương Minh Quý sharpens his interest in the afterlives of war, displayed earlier in his speculative documentary The Treehouse, which examined the effects of the postwar nation-building policy on Vietnam’s indigenous populations from the perspective of a Martian peering down on Earth. VIET AND NAM inaugurates the arrival of a new voice in Vietnamese cinema, one which asks if the substance of our human relationships can withstand the rippling effects of history.

– Justin Nguyen