POMELO
Phuong Thao Tran | Swann Dubus | 2017 | Vietnam | 75’ | Documentary
Hanoi, Vietnam. Pomelo neighborhood must be razed to the ground to build a new ring road. Several groups of migrant workers coming from rural provinces are struggling to make a living from the demolition or despite of it. Living in violent and precarious conditions, they never wallow in self-pity but rather turn their lives into an absurd, dark and bitter comedy. After Finding Phong, the two directors take us into an overlooked reality of Vietnam.
Phuong Thao Tran (born in 1977 in Hanoi, Vietnam) moved to France in 2000 to become a documentary filmmaker. After graduating in Political Science in Paris, she studied documentary filmmaking and writing techniques at the University of Poitiers. Back in Vietnam, she participated in several workshops at Ateliers Varan. She directed her first film, Rêves d'ouvrières, in 2006, which won an award at Cinéma du Réel 2007. For more than 10 years, she has been co-directing documentary films with Swann Dubus, addressing major themes of Vietnamese society from an intimate angle. She is also involved as a producer with young Vietnamese directors ; notably with Children of the Mist, by Hà Lệ Diễm, screened at the 5th edition of Ici Vietnam Festival Cinema in 2022.
Swann Dubus was born in 1977 in Argenteuil, France. After a master's degree in Modern Literature on Robert Bresson, he completed a doctorate in film studies at the University of Paris III. His academic research focuses on defining the moral and aesthetic contours of cinematographic representations of intimate space, a preoccupation that is also the basis of his work as a documentary filmmaker. Since 2000, Swann has been writing, directing, filming and editing documentary films in Europe, Africa and Asia. Since 2011, he has collaborated with Phuong Thao Tran on several documentary films including With or without me (White Goose Award - DMZ Docs 2012) and Finding Phong (Grand Prix Nanook - Jean Rouch IFF 2016, Paris).