Hair, Paper, Water…
Singapore Premiere
Trương Minh Quý, Nicolas Graux Belgium, France, Vietnam 2025 71 min PG
A home movie like no other, ensconced in the tradition of silent film, and a poetically pedagogical archive of a vanishing community.
Returning to a central figure in his earlier film The Tree House (2019), Trương Minh Quý and his collaborator Nicolas Graux release a lyrical ebb and flow of images that carry Cao Thị Hậu back to the womb-like cavern of her birthplace and of the minority Rục people.
This contemplative documentary floats through Hậu’s meditations into a syllabus of ancestral knowledge in the spirit of oral tradition. The filmmakers’ loose assembly of images, paired with intertitles that coalesce into a vocabulary of an endangered language, recalls silent cinema. With the cranking of a Bolex camera onto 16mm film, memories of the Rục’s vanishing culture stream into us, if only for a moment, yet long enough to ripple within our consciousness.
Synopsis Writer: Vicki Yang
Q&A with Filmmaker(s)
30 Nov, Sun 2:00PM / 92 min
Oldham Theatre
AT THE FEST!
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RUSH QUEUE:
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Hair, Paper, Water...
Tóc, Giấy và Nước...
Trương Minh Quý, Nicolas Graux
Belgium, France, Vietnam
2025
Rục, Vietnamese
71 min
PG
Singapore Premiere
Nicolas Graux
Belgian filmmaker Nicolas Graux’s debut feature Century of Smoke (2019) premiered at Visions du Réel. Hair, Paper, Water… was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Filmmakers of the Present competition.
Trương Minh Quý
Vietnamese filmmaker Trương Minh Quý’s earlier films include Viet and Nam (2024), which premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and won the FIPRESCI and Best Director awards at the 35th SGIFF.
Cao Thị Hậu, Cao Xuân Doanh, Cao Thị Hiệu
Julie Freres, Thomas Hakim, Julien Graff
