BLESSED LAND
Phạm Ngọc Lân | 2019 | Vietnam | 19’ | Fiction
A middle-aged woman and her son visit her late husband’s grave - situated in a former fishing village she hasn’t been to in decades. In the cemetery on the sandy dunes, they wander around for a long time without finding the headstone. Has her memory eroded, or has the grave been concealed somewhere underneath the green grass of the new golf courses? It’s true, for the nouveau riche, land for the living to play on is better than land for the dead to rest at.
Phạm Ngọc Lân is a Vietnamese film director with a background in urban planning and architecture. Lan’s first two short fiction films, Another City (2016) and Blessed Land (2019) both premiered at the Berlinale Shorts Competition. His newest short film The Unseen River (2020), which is part of the anthology project MEKONG 2030, premiered at the Pardi di Domani in Locarno Film Festival and screened at the 5th edition of Ici Vietnam Festival Cinéma in 2022. Currently, Lan is developing his first feature film Cu Li Never Cries which was selected for L'Atelier 2017 - Festival de Cannes, the Busan Project Market 2016 and the SEAFIC Script Lab.