MỘT CÕI ĐI VỀ
Trần Trang Hà Thị | 2021 | Vietnam | 30’ | Fiction
6TH EDITION
Amidst the flood season, a city boy follows his father to a remote mountain village in Que Phong to attend his grandfather's funeral. As immigrants, the boy's family must invite the shaman and relatives from the plains to organize a funeral according to their homeland's custom. shying away from people, the boy quickly feels connected to the animals there and is especially attracted to the strange appearance of termites in the house. Since the people from the plains are unable to attend the funeral due to the weather, the adults in the family reluctantly decide to arrange the funeral according to the customs of local ethnic minorities. After the unfamiliar burial procedures, the family soon feels exhausted and lost. Following the termites, the boy travels through different spaces of dream and reality to reunite the living and the dead at the yin yang border.Trang Tran was born in 1993, into a Kinh family (the majority ethnic group in Vietnam) that resides in a lowland migrant area surrounded by the mountainous region of ethnic minorities, bordering Laos in central Vietnam. At the age of 15, Trang left her family to study at a specialized high school which was 180 km away. In the big cities, access to art and culture encouraged her to forgo a degree in telecommunications engineering to pursue her dream of filmmaking. Trang graduated from Hanoi University of Theater and Performing Arts in September 2020 as a valedictorian with a major in film directing. With a vagrant background and a life of constant drifting, Trang dives into the domain of nostalgia, memories, and dreams where there exist spaces that are mixed between home and distant lands, reflections on culture and identity among ethnic groups in regions of Vietnam.
