“A documentary-fiction tracks down an old hippy dead-end, final journey…On the highlands of Northern Vietnam, an old white-man travels on his wretched motorbike, makes friends with a young well-off local couple who has a flying cam. When the old man looses everything, he comes back to the grandmother’s house of his new local friend, but the couple leaves and let him with the old woman and her niece, a Vietnamese school-girl, 10 years-old. The flying cam hits an eye injuring the old man who hopes to stay in this place, to help the little girl for writing an English poem, but the police tells him to leave. We don’t know where will be the old man, is he dead or not on the road?”
The film doesn’t want to convey any message of what is better. We only try to give an ambiance of the fact… that even in a very small town, so far from the big city’s civilization, the new way of modern technologies invades and takes the place of all traditional values.
Throughout the film, relation between the two different cultures, especially when the elements of one culture are appropriated and interpreted by the other culture, evokes a comical tender friction. The end of the film remains open.
A very narrow and strict budget pushes me to go far behind images in a metaphoric way, in order to reach the essential of simple things with no means. I hope that I can mix up life and death, real and fiction in the seemingly simple and ordinary lives.
Screenwriter and director Pham Siu (Pham Thi Nhung) is among the rare female filmmakers in Vietnam. She studied History of Art at the University of Geneva and later attended Conservatory of Popular Theater in Geneva. She received Butoh dance training with Myriam Zoulias for several years. Her well-known fiction features included Here or… there? (2010) and Homostratus (2013), On the endless road (2016).
