Delicately unfurling as an introductory vocabulary lesson, one informed by the portraiture at the film’s core — that of the formidable Thi Hau Cao, a subject in director Trúóng Minh Quy’s 2019 docufiction, The Tree House — a quiet elegy arises, where generational rifts inform cultural marginalization and the spectre of colonialism punctures through the endeavors of pedagogy. Learning words one at a time, their spelling displayed as intertitles throughout, each exercise leads us into the oral history of Thi. Hair, Paper, Water… is indeed a compilation of her anecdotes, observations that highlight the radically shifting socioeconomic and cultural continuities accruing in Vietnam across the last few decades. Directors Trúóng and Nicolas Graux, in this, their second collaboration, siphon the subjectivity of their protagonist into a fragmentary, poetic archive of Ruc, an endangered Vietic language spoken by the Ruc people — a sub-ethnic group from which Thi Hau Cao descends, a part of the Vietic-speaking groups in the Quảng Bình province known as Chut — in the Tuyên Hóa district. The film’s title operates dually as a syllabus of verbiage to be spoken aloud and repeated in concise tutorials across the film’s runtime, and also an accentuation of the respective word’s relation to place, invoking distinct textures that prompt many of Thi’s accounts.
One such tale regards her recollection of the years she spent growing, cutting and selling her hair, as to provide resources to her family and residence. At one time in her life, the place she called home was a cave on the fringe of shimmering riverbanks. Trúóng and Graux ensure the relationship between a people and their land is insisted upon, denoting urbanization and its economic philosophies’ encroachment as a seismic sociological shift that fundamentally changed the lives of thousands. This film’s essence organizes around just one effect of this reconstruction: the Ruc language we are being guided through being lessons for Thi’s grandson, a young boy whose fluency is in Vietnamese and whose education is represented to favour English. In this complex of dynamics, Hair, Paper, Water…’s intimate portraiture communicates a vast network of globalization’s homogenizing faculties. Contesting this, however, the film foregrounds Thi Hau Cao’s many herbal recipes; more lessons to share, more knowledge to document and pass down — remedies for postpartum afflictions, respiratory infections (Covid included), indigestion, bloating, and various sprains. What is shared with us, spectators who initially operate as surrogates for Thi’s grandchild prior to his in-film introduction, is an oral tradition with a pedagogy that remains distinguishable and disparate from the forms of education we see her grandson partake in.
Hair, Paper, Water… positions itself to articulate a methodology of historical and cultural teachings that recognize the problem of contemporary colonial hegemonies as a persisting malady that maintains its threat of cultural dissolution. In its playfulness, its cherished proximity, a sensitive and beautiful record is constructed, both rebuking the reification of sociality and bearing witness to its processes. But how ephemeral and inconclusive it all is, when there is in such a structure the demonstration of a tragic undercurrent, which threatens to wipe all this knowledge, history, and custom away. In its discursive diarism, Hair, Paper, Water… upholds a balance, respecting the life and knowledge of Thi Hau Cao — her endeavors to fulfil her matriarchal ambitions and the fullness that brings — all while it also glances into the shadows of a future whose unknown quality looms over the rural landscapes, where economy seeks a unification that further dilutes the communities living outside of municipal centers. As everything rolls along, Trúóng and Graux reflect on what’s been unaccounted for, ruminating on the consequences of such an erasure, simultaneously taking in the richness before them: a complex of experiences, a life built through the land and its most minuscule of details.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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