Film

Song to the Front

2011 · 5m

The film uses footage from Trần Đắc’s eponymous feature-length classic produced by the state-owned Vietnam Feature Film Studio. Based on the story of a real-life hero, the original 1973 film was made to provide encouragement to young soldiers serving in the war. Accompanied by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, this recut, with its rapid rhythm and suspenseful images leading to ambiguous intervals imbued with both violence and sensuality, facilitated a multilayered experience that disturbs and detours from the source material’s clear-cut message, content and aesthetics. An exploration of cinematic language, the film simultaneously investigates the narratives generated by collective memory and official history, as it seeks and questions the truth and the possibility to construct it from images. A pioneering found footage work in Vietnam, Song to the Front exemplifies Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s experiments with moving images.

• Nguyễn Trinh ThiDirector

Release date

December 31, 2011

Status

Released

Original language

English

Runtime

5m