Phạm Thiên Ân’s road to filmmaking was circuitous. Born to a Catholic family in the rural mountains of Vietnam’s southern Lam Dong province, he spent four years studying information technology at Hoa Sen University in Ho Chi Minh City before leaving without a degree to pursue his lifelong interest in cinematography. After a decade of supporting himself by editing wedding videos, he developed his first short The Mute (2018), followed closely by Stay Awake, Be Ready (2019). His first feature, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, is a three-hour epic that builds off of his last short with an astounding sensitivity to rhythm and tone. The film follows a 30-something man named Thien (Le Phong Vu), a wedding video editor who is forced to return to his rural hometown after a scooter accident claims the life of his sister-in-law, orphaning his five-year-old nephew. Thien is faced with questions about the child’s father, his brother Dao, who had disappeared from his family many years before. This search provides the narrative vehicle for Thien’s scavenge for faith.
The patient pacing, simple narrative, immersive sound design, and visual complexity make Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell a rare contemporary film that regularly approaches the transcendentalism of its predecessors of influence, from Apichatpong Weresethakul’s Tropical Malady to Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia. The film was recognized with Pham’s win of the Un Certain Regard award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival for best first feature, and to the benefit of audiences stateside, his masterful debut will be released nationally this week. Pham’s film turns fact to fiction, and fiction to fact. It was my pleasure to sit down with the director and try to pull the two apart.[ppp_patron_only level=”3″ silent=”no”]
Conor Truax: First and foremost, I wanted to congratulate you on such a formative debut. I was fortunate to see it a couple of days ago and have been thinking about it ever since. Next week, the film will begin playing in the United States for an English-speaking audience. The film is so deliberate in its minimal use of dialogue, and despite the irony of us speaking through an interpreter right now, I’m curious whether there are elements of Vietnamese speech that you think English speakers ought to know, or might miss out on, experiencing the language of this film in subtitles.
Phạm Thiên Ân: Actually, the translation from Vietnamese went through a number of strenuous revisions, and I was actively involved in this process of revising and polling opinions about how the translation was going from people he trusted. So I actually think that the English subtitles are actually better than the Vietnamese dialogue, because the lines are so concise and the meaning feels very poignant and punchy. Now, every word is steeped in even more meaning. I don’t think there’s anything that wouldn’t be conveyed to an English-speaking audience, beyond what isn’t core to the film.
CT: It’s interesting to hear that, because the dialogue – through subtitles – feels so sparse in a way that’s really poetic and, ultimately, moving. A big part of what makes the film so engrossing is its rhythm, and what really stuck out to me in building that rhythm was the acuity of the sound design, particularly in the more rural settings. I’m curious how you think about sound design?
Ân: I think that in the film, sound and image have equal roles. I put a lot of emphasis on sound, so during the filmmaking process I was working with a friend who was doing sound design and engineering to determine sounds that were true to the texture and topography of the urban and rural atmospheres Thien finds himself in, especially the natural setting of Vietnam. Every time I wrote a scene in the script, I imagined what the sound would be like in that scene. In the process of location scouting, I really considered the local sound sources so that I could create a really unique sound specific to that location, like a fingerprint. When filming, after I got a shot that I thought was satisfactory, I’d get a recording of the sound at that moment to capture the essence and environment at that time. That was a really useful source of raw sound for post-production. In post, I like the scene to sound like the moment of filming a lot. When I mix the film, I try to make the environmental and atmospheric sounds much more pronounced than other films so that people can feel the sound texture and material of the film in a way that is totally immersive.
CT: It’s abundantly clear in the film how much attention you pay to sound. It’s totally engrossing. The next thing I wanted to ask about was the distinct shotstyle that you use: distanced, controlled, and almost voyeuristic. It feels omniscient, a fact that’s accentuated by religion being such a focus of the film. I’m curious about how your relationship with religion has evolved and influenced your filmmaking, and in turn, how your filmmaking has influenced your sense of faith?
Ân: I come from a very Catholic family. My grandparents and parents were Catholic, and are from the North, although they migrated South. I was heavily influenced by my family, but from the time I was small, until recently, following Catholicism felt like an obligation or responsibility, rather than something I could actually grasp. The film was an experiment of both my cinematic vision, but also with my faith and religion. I found that in making the film, my faith evolved alongside Thien’s. There were many moments that happened throughout the filmmaking process that felt, not coincidental, but like divine intervention. Some of that had happened when I was working on the short film [Stay Awake, Be Ready], but when I was making my feature, there were times where I had no idea where it was going and I had to have faith that I was in the process of moving and that I would get somewhere. It was only after I was done filming that I realized that faith had guided me to the end of the journey. It ended up being an exploration of faith for me as much as the characters. Faith is something that is difficult to talk about directly. Here, I realized that it is something that is much more easily viewed, and in turn, felt.
CT: That’s beautiful. Very rarely do I feel that contemporary films have the ambition to approach transcendence in that way, but I think that this film was certainly successful in doing so. To that end, much of Thien’s story was pulled from pieces of Ân’s life. Thien’s inner life is so obscured from us that he feels totally familiar. It was easy to project my own experiences onto his, despite being from such a different place, and being such a different person. How did you go about universalizing some of the more atomic facts of your life?
Ân: There’s quite a lot of me in this film. It’s my first feature, so I wasn’t sure how to get viewers to understand how the characters feel, and for them to approximate that feeling themselves. I also wanted to use mainly long and wide shots with few close-ups. I was worried I was being too experimental because I wanted people to understand the characters accurately, or what I thought of as being accurate, but I didn’t want to use a lot of dialogue or close-ups. I was trying to figure out how to subtly convey feelings without talking, or even much emoting. It was certainly a challenge, but not as challenging as pushing my own feelings to a minimum so that the actors could allow for the characters’ emotions to come out organically. Even though there are a lot of facts from my life in this film, I pushed my own emotional involvement to a minimum to give space for the very real emotion of the characters on screen to come out. It’s been great as I’ve screened the film worldwide, because audience members all have totally different perspectives on Thien. Thien was built of facts from my life, but he is ultimately a character who is mostly fictional, but with real emotion.
CT: On the point of blending fact and fiction to get at a real emotion, or truth, I read that Mr. Luu, the Vietnam war veteran and town shrouder, was a non-actor telling his own stories from the war. Is that true? And if so, what was your approach to blending fact and fiction in film?
Ân: Mr. Luu was a real person. I happened on his stories from the war in a YouTube video and went to his house and spoke with him, and realized he was extremely special. I wanted to bring him into the film in a way that was reminiscent of documentaries. When production began, the production company was keen on distinguishing whether the film was documentary or fiction, and wanted to set guidelines on what could or couldn’t be done. But I wanted to use a documentary style to guide the audience to another world, another kind of person, another meaning of a home, before returning to the main, fictional plot of the story. With Mr. Luu, I wanted to bring his story into the plot to glue together the story around it through the feeling and specialness of him as a person, and his role in the town. When we actually began shooting, I thought I had everything all planned out, but when we got to shooting I realized that Mr. Luu really couldn’t remember lines. But we made things work, and it was worth it. From that point onward, everything felt easy, and I felt free to blend documentary and fiction as I saw fit. I wanted to create something unique, and I think we did.
CT: One last question, on the same point – Thien takes up work editing wedding videos, as I understand that you did when you first left school for IT. In your eyes, are wedding videos cinema?
Ân: When I was making wedding videos, it felt like I was mimicking cinema. I’ve always loved cinema, and when I was making wedding videos, I tried to use that love to edit wedding footage that would capture the raw emotion of peoples’ special day. One of my interests in including wedding footage in the film was rooted in how unique Vietnam’s wedding culture is. I also wanted to make wedding footage feel cinematic. When you make a wedding video, there’s usually an overemphasis on it being concise, and forcefully sentimental. When I make films, I want the expression of emotions to be minimal, so that the essence of the intense emotions are raw and available for the viewer to take. [/ppp_patron_only]
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