Vietnamese film enters top 15 of Oscar 2023 for the first time

This is the first time we have had a film included in the top 15 films of the year for the nomination for “Best Documentary”.

The Tay girl and her journey to documentary

Director Ha Le Diem was born in 1991 into a Tay farmer family in Bac Kan. Diem spent her childhood like many other children in the area. In addition to going to school to learn to read and write, she also followed her friends to catch crabs and snails, herd buffaloes and cows. With a grandfather who was a teacher, Diem was lucky to have him as her childhood companion, teaching her the first letters and how to solve the first exercises and questions of a child's life.

At that time, Diem’s grandparents had a black and white TV, and whenever they had free time, the children in the area would come over to watch interesting programs. Diem was very passionate about an experiential TV show hosted by a Russian couple who traveled around the world to introduce themselves. Little Diem noticed that the couple was introduced on TV as reporters. That was the first time Diem heard that title and told herself that she would become a reporter in the future.

Director Ha Le Diem made the documentary “Children of the Mist”. Photo: Fanpage Children of the Mist

When Ha Le Diem was in high school, the Internet was not yet popular in the mountainous areas. Fumbling through the printed list of university names and admission scores, Diem chose the Journalism major at the Hanoi University of Social Sciences and Humanities as an inevitable choice. That was a period when not many people where Diem lived were studying at universities in Hanoi, so she had to research and make her own decisions without anyone to advise or confide in. Thinking back, Diem said that it was a kind of loneliness that perhaps every child has to go through when they grow up.

When she was admitted to her dream major, the Tay student came to Hanoi to enroll in school with a shy and bewildered attitude. With the help of her friends, Ha Le Diem gradually got used to urban life. As if by chance, one day, a friend in her dormitory advised her to study documentary filmmaking at TPD Center for Supporting and Developing Cinema Talents. Diem did not understand what a documentary was and did not see the need to study, because studying at university was enough for Diem to become a reporter as she dreamed. But when she learned that this would be TPD's last free course, Diem decided to register for the course. Luckily, she was selected among many applications. This course taught Diem the first lessons about documentary filmmaking and led her to practice making documentary films.

Born and raised in the mountains, Ha Le Diem is very familiar with women and girls of ethnic minorities. They are the people that Diem feels understand them and wants to accompany them. Being a documentary director allows Diem to have more time to accompany and understand the lives of the characters more deeply than a reporter, which is what Diem experienced when making her graduation film at PTD called "Con di truong hoc", about a Dao woman infected with HIV, who cycles more than 10 kilometers to school every day to take her 5-year-old son. The realistic and touching scenes in the film include the scene of a barefoot mother carrying her child across a stream in the middle of a cold winter, her legs purple but she still takes her child to school without a day of rest. Diem's ​​first film received the "Silver Kite" award in 2013 (that year there was no Golden Kite award).

The story of "Children in the mist"

In 2016, the Institute for Research on Economics, Society and Environment (iSEE) launched the program “Touch, Touch, Touch” for artists to use artistic materials and, together with ethnic minority communities, tell stories about ethnic minority cultures in Vietnam. Diem heard about it and registered to participate in the program, with the earnest desire to tell stories about ethnic minority children. After that, she was arranged to go to Sapa, to stay at the house of Mr. Ma A Pho - the father character in the movie “Children of the Mist”.

Poster for the documentary "Children in the Mist".

Coming to Sapa, Diem was especially interested in Di - a 12-year-old Hmong girl who was agile, individualistic and lovable. Through Di, Diem seemed to see her own childhood. Diem realized that for ethnic minority children in the highlands like Diem and Di, the only opportunity to go out and explore the world is through school and education. However, Di and the Hmong children in Sapa are stuck between traditional customs and modern values. Therefore, growing up and having to face loneliness, sadness and confusion to find a way between those two values ​​is not easy. That is what kept Diem following Di, living in Sapa to make films for nearly 3 years, from when Di was a 12-year-old girl until she became a young woman. The process of making this film helped Diem feel like she matured many times when she had to make "very directorial" choices, such as cutting the film from more than 50 hours to nearly 2 hours in the final version.

As a director, films are like children. Therefore, witnessing the film being received by audiences and experts, Diem feels very happy because her "child" can go far and experience many places in the world. However, she said, she did not do everything with the purpose of getting the film nominated for this or that award. In fact, when she won the Best Director award in the International Competition category of the 2021 Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival, Diem was very surprised, and even more so did not expect the film to be nominated for an Oscar because it gathered all the outstanding films. Instead of putting too much energy into campaigning for the award, Diem wants to focus more on the process of experiencing with the characters themselves and more specifically, she believes that a film director is not much different from a carpenter, when the product is finished, it is time for the carpenter to focus on the new product. In the future, Diem is still surveying to start working on the next documentary.