Vancouver Premiere

“Nothing short of spellbinding … The best final shot of the year: a breath-stealing beauty that will leave you frozen in your seat even after the credits are over.”

Luke Hicks, The Film Stage

Vietnamese history is excavated, literally and figuratively, in director Trương Minh Quý’s astonishing new work, a love story staged in subterranean corridors and haunted by spectres of unreconciled war. Set in rural Vietnam at the turn of the 21st century, the film centres on the clandestine romance between two young coal miners, Viet (Đào Duy Bảo Định) and Nam (Phạm Thanh Hải), for whom intimacy occurs only in tunnelled chambers beneath the earth—twinkling anthracite encircling their bodies like sunken stars. Their time together is fleeting. Nam has paid a trafficker to smuggle him out of Vietnam, but not before accompanying his mother on a pilgrimage south to locate the remains of his father, one of untold ​“missing martyrs” whose bodies were never recovered after the war. Banned in Vietnam for its ​“negative view” of the nation, this sensual, tenebrous work, shot in granular 16mm, is a triumph of vision and historical unforgetting.

In Vietnamese with English subtitles

One of the Best Movies of 2024 (#10)
John Waters

“Artfully maps a heartbreaking romance onto the battered history of a nation … Quý has accomplished something special with Việt and Nam.”

Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter

“Absolutely hypnotic … A masterwork of emotion and imagery.”

Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com
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