DocFest: A Moving Image Festival

In what has now transpired as the final edition of their annual festival before Hanoi DocLab house moves out of their almost ten-year base, DocFest 2017 doubles in scope. Introducing Hanoi ĐốcPhết – a whole week-long naughty-cousin’d programme running in multiple venues across the city in parallel to the core DocFest happenings at the Goethe-Institut. Beyond structural changes and unencumbered of institutional pressures, ĐốcPhết constitutes an exploration of DocLab’s future avenues, in which there might exist yet a larger role to play for grass-root, collective action. By design or otherwise, a symbiosis exists between the festival’s SEACRN-led symposium – under the theme ‘Time, Space and the Visceral’ and the ĐốcPhết programme. The latter’s highlights include ‘The Kalampag Tracking Agency,’ an ambitious survey of over thirty eventful years of Philippine moving image and video works; Lau Kek Huat’s ‘Absent without Leave’ and Đoàn Hồng Lê’s ‘My Father the Last Communist’ – both delving into, from opposite sides, the legacy of Cold War in South East Asia, through personal memories of the filmmakers’ fathers; a selection of features and shorts from members of Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, wherein the physicality of sound and its omnipresence in 21st century urban environments are made manifest through images of grit and destruction – treading a similar path, experimental documentary ‘We Don’t Care about Music anyway’ explores the madness of Tokyo’s noise music scene in relation to its surroundings; a retrospective on Au Sow-Yee, an artist working at the forefront of South East Asian moving image; the Vietnam premiere of ‘The Man Who Built Cambodia,’ a documentary on Vann Molyvann, whose practice came to define the architectural blueprint of post-independence Cambodia; and various found-footage works sprinkling throughout.
Beside the aforementioned strands, ĐốcPhết also features a five-channel expanded-cinema installation by photographer Jamie Maxtone-Graham at Nha San Collective; a sound concert/installation by sonic ethnographer Ernst Karel at VUI Studio; as well as an 11-hour event at Manzi wherein the feature film ‘Manamakana’ and a programme of shorts will play on loop.
Last but definitely not least, as per a DocFest tradition, a crop of new Vietnamese artist’s films will be showcased. Beside familiar names that have appeared in previous DocFest editions – Đỗ Văn Hoàng, Trương Quế Chi, Ngô Thanh, Tạ Minh Đức, Đoàn Hồng Lê and Nguyễn Trinh Thi – be sure to look out for the new faces: Hải Yến, Huệ Nguyễn, Lê Xuân Tiến, Thịnh Nguyễn, Lê Đình Chung, Nguyễn Song, Vi Đỗ and Trâm Lương.
The exhibition will open on 5 November and be on display until 12 November 2017 at Nha San Collective and other locations.