Writer and Director: Trương Minh Quý
First seen in the UK at last year’s BFI London Film Festival, Viet and Nam returns for this year’s Flare Festival. The relationship between the two protagonists – although we are never sure which man is Viet and which man is Nam – fits perfectly into Flare’s remit to show the best new LGBTQIA+ films, but the queerness here almost takes the back seat in a film that’s main concern is the search for bodies of the war dead by their loved ones.
Viet and Nam are miners digging for coal in Vietnam in 2001. The coalface glitters like the night sky. They are lovers, sometimes having sex on their breaks underground, their naked bodies sensuously smeared with coal. Of course, they must keep their relationship a secret, but one of their mothers – the only mother we see – suspects and tells her son to bring his friend home more often.
This mother lost her husband who was shot in the Vietnam War and then buried quickly by his fellow soldiers in a shallow grave. She wants to find his body and inter him correctly at home. A veteran of the war from the coal town helps her with maps while she believes that her vivid dreams may tell her the exact spot where her husband lies. If not, there’s always the crazy psychic who wanders the overgrown battlefield finding burnt flesh in the soil.
The mother wants to bring her husband home, but at the same time, her son is preparing to leave and go to the West for a better life. She knows that he has to go, indeed expects him to go, but trusts that he will return one day. The sons of other mothers in the town have already departed and now they send back money and gifts of Western sweets and ovens. “What’s an oven?” says either Viet or Nam. If they don’t leave, the young men will spend their lives in the mine, where the coal dust makes its way into their lungs and their ears.
They dig for coal, and they dig for the father whom Viet or Nam has never seen. They dig for escape, and they dig to return. Densely packed with ideas and parallels, Trương Minh Quý’s film examines the grief of a country still battling to put the bloody past at rest. What the boys do find while digging in the forest suggests that it’s still too soon to face history.
So, instead, Viet and Nam must leave and one of them trains for the big day, rehearsing how to hold his breath while swimming across a river in a plastic bag. Phạm Thanh Hải and Đào Duy Bảo Định put in exceptional performances as the two young men, distant as ghosts as if they have departed.
Viet and Nam is screening at BFI Flare 2025 from 19-30 March.
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Past and future ghosts
