At Hanoi DocFest, the organizer believe in a cinema of individual voices, and each year the organizer bring to the audience independent works from Vietnam, as well as ones from around the globe – works in which the organizer see powerful potential of creativity and of a vast and generous cinema.
This year’s festival has an important structural change: the program will last for a week and happen in many places in the city, to give the audience a broader perspective of what’s happening in the independent film scene. At DocFest 2017, you will find films that contemplate the many aspects of the social and the personal, manifested not only in informational route but also in unique formal approaches. The organizer are honored to be jointly organizing a 2-day symposium dedicated to cinema of the region, titled “Time, Space, and the Visceral in Southeast Asian Cinema”, with the Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network, with speakers including Philippa Lovatt, Gaik Khoo, Jasmine Trice, Mariam Lam, Hitomi Hasegawa, Sow-Yee Au, Davide Cazzaro, Merv Espina, Thaiddhi; on the Vietnamese side, the organizer  welcome Síu Phạm, Trương Minh Quý, Trần Ngọc Hiếu, Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Trần Duy Hưng, Trần Trung Hiếu. The organizer will also have the pleasure to welcome Birgit Glombitza, the art director of Hamburg International Short Film Festival, who will introduce us to the contemporary aesthetics and current trends of the short films in different international festivals through three screening programs and presentations. Furthermore, our schedule includes an intensive 3-day field recording and sound design workshop at our festival, led by Ernst Karel, a sound engineering specialist from Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL).
During the weekend, the organizer have two main screening programs: “Then and Now” and “Portrait”. Here, the audience will travel through the different landscapes of Vietnam, the Gia Lai region with Drowing Dew – a collaborative project between Art Labor Collective and Trương Quế Chi and Đỗ Văn Hoàng, the Mekong area with “Flat Sunlight” by Lena Bui, the street of Khâm Thiên in “March 23” by Phạm Thị Hảo… to meet an ex-freelance interpreter at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in the mid-1960s, a man who came home after spending 18 years in prison, families from the North, the South, and Middle Vietnam who live together in an apartment near the Vietnam National Children’s Hospital, and many more. They are the stories that the organizer believe, to a certain extent, will tell a story of a Vietnam in which the organizer are living and witnessing its many changes.
The exhibition will open on 6 Nov and be on display until 12 November 2017 at Goethe Institut and Vui Studio.