During the three-day weekend, the meeting between documentary and fiction, narrative and abstract, film and poetry promises to bring many interesting experiences to the capital's audience.
The program “Fiction Non-Fiction I” on the opening night of October 29 is the highlight of the event, with Vietnamese short films that will blur the boundaries between documentary and cinema genres, as well as between film and art video.
The next highlight of Mini DocFest will be the films from the DocLab 2013 basic filmmaking course, which will be screened 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 living in Osaka, Japan Werner Penzel will introduce his pioneering black and white documentary film shot on 35mm film called “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 Non-Fiction II” and the feature documentary “The Last Journey of Ms. Phung” will take the audience on an exciting journey from Vietnam to Myanmar, Japan, India, Indonesia and Cambodia. The screening will end in the evening of the same day with “Mother’s Room” – the film by director Siu Pham which won the Best Unique Vision award at the Queen World Film Festival in New York (USA) this year. In particular, the audience will have the opportunity to discuss and debate with the filmmakers after each screening.
The program also includes other film events, such as: Career discussions with guest speakers who are independent and experimental Vietnamese filmmakers in both the feature and documentary fields; a Film Study Group (FSG) discussion on Chris Marker; and a workshop on Independent Cinema with Siu Pham. A series of videos made in a workshop entitled “Labor through a Shot” led by Harun Farocki in Hanoi in 2013 will also be screened during the festival to commemorate the pioneering filmmaker and veteran video artist who passed away in Germany last August.
Once again, Mini DocFest creates an exciting forum for creative people and those who love the art of filmmaking.
Program information available at:www.goethe.de/vietnam|www.hanoigrapevine.com|www.hanoidoclab.org
