Making its California debut after a yearlong international festival tour that began with a world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival—where it won two prizes, including a Golden Leopard in the Filmmakers of the Present section—and stops along the way at prestigious festivals such as Busan, New York, London, and Vienna, Hair, Paper, Water… is disarmingly simple. Over its slender 71 minutes, this fragmentary documentary spans several years in the life of its subject, Cao Thị Hậu, an elder from Vietnam's Rục minority who lives in the country's lush and remote Quảng Bình region. Specifically, we join her as she welcomes a new member to her family and, in the process, recalls both her own life, which began with a cave birth, and that of her daughter.
Traveling to Saigon for the first time to visit her daughter and newborn grandchild, Thị Hậu laments the bustle and density of the big city, describing its looming tower blocks as “houses hanging in the air.” While there, she receives a call from back home that her cow has been fined for eating someone's sweet potato patch. Beyond documenting the agrarian nature of Rục life, Hair, Paper, Water… also honors both their homespun herbal medicine, used to ameliorate everything from a sore ankle to Covid-19, and their endangered language. In fact, the film's title references Thị Hậu's word-by-word lessons to her grandchild in the Rục dialect, which recur throughout the film.
Co-directed by Trương Minh Quý (best known for his Cannes-premiering Viet and Nam from 2024) and Nicolas Graux, the film matches the tactile elements of its subject—Thị Hậu is seen harvesting acacia, hand-wringing laundry, bathing her grandchild—by shooting on 16mm color. The directors deliberately leave in moments of camera malfunction, such as flashes of leaking light or sequences when the 16mm loop is lost and the image becomes a shuddering streak. By using a handheld Bolex, they achieve both intimacy and casual poetry. The views they capture feel more ocular than cinematic. As the image distorts or mutates at random, we are reminded both of the intermediary nature of cinema—that a person with a camera is recording what is shown—and of the mutable qualities of vision and memory. To further embed the viewer in Thị Hậu's time-dilating reality, Hair, Paper, Water… employs an immersive sound design that is equally tranquilizing and transportive. A film to be experienced in the sanctity of a theater, Hair, Paper, Water… manages to be a powerfully tender cinematic experience built from small-gauge film, available light, and nature’s murmur.
Hair, Paper, Water... screens Saturday, April 25, at BAMPFA, and Saturday, May 2, at the Marina Theater as part of the SFFILM Festival.
