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Over the weekend, the encounter between documentary and fiction, narrative and abstraction, film and poetry promises to bring many interesting experiences to audiences in the capital city.
The "Fiction and Non-Fiction I" program on the opening night of October 29th was the highlight of the event, featuring Vietnamese short films that blurred the lines between documentary and feature films, as well as between film and video art.
The next highlight of Mini DocFest will be the screenings of works from the DocLab 2013 basic filmmaking course, shown on the second night of the festival. Through this program, the audience will have the opportunity to follow the formation and development of a new generation of independent and experimental documentary filmmakers in Hanoi. Also on the second day, German filmmaker Werner Penzel, based in Osaka, Japan, will present his pioneering black-and-white documentary filmed on 35mm film, entitled "Crossing the Border". On Sunday, a selection of films from the Chopshops Southeast Asian Documentary Film Festival 2014 in Jakarta, along with the program "Fiction and Non-Fiction II" and the feature-length documentary "The Last Journey of Ms. Phung", will take the audience on a fascinating journey from Vietnam to Myanmar, Japan, India, Indonesia, and Cambodia. The film screenings will conclude that evening with "Mother's Room"—a film by director Siu Pham that won the Best Unique Vision award at this year's Queen World Film Festival in New York (USA). Notably, audiences will have the opportunity to discuss and debate with the filmmakers after each screening.
The program also includes other film-related events, such as: career talks with guest speakers who are independent and experimental Vietnamese filmmakers in both feature and documentary fields; a discussion by the Film Studies Group (FSG) on Chris Marker; and a workshop on independent cinema with Siu Pham. A series of videos made during the workshop entitled “Labor Through a Single Shot,” led by Harun Farocki in Hanoi in 2013, will also be screened during the film festival to commemorate the pioneering filmmaker and veteran video artist who passed away in Germany last August.
Once again, Mini DocFest has created an exciting forum for those who love creativity and filmmaking.
Program details can be found at:www.goethe.de/vietnam|www.hanoigrapevine.com|www.hanoidoclab.org
