‘Hair, Paper, Water…’ review: Poetic documentary shines a light on Vietnam’s Indigenous Ruc people

Dir. Nicolas Graux, Truong Minh Quy. Belgium/France/Vietnam. 2025. 71mins

It’s all too simple to label sure forms of impressionistic cinema ‘poetic’. However Vietnamese character research Hair, Paper, Water… genuinely deserves the time period for the connections it makes between phrases, photographs and consciousness. This concise characteristic serves as a reminder that documentary could be immersive in a real sense, taking the viewer deep into the intimacy of unfamiliar locations and cultures – and generally of its topics’ interiority.

Takes a contemplative strategy

The movie is a collaboration between Belgian director and cinematographer Nicolas Graux, recognized for 2019 Laos documentary A Century of Smoke, and Vietnamese director Truong Minh Quy – additionally this movie’s editor – whose debut characteristic Viet & Nam was one of many discoveries of Cannes 2024. Following their quick fiction collaboration Porcupine (2023), the entrancing Hair, Paper, Water… ought to proceed to trigger ripples on the pageant circuit and in specialist slots, following its airings in Locarno (the place it received a Golden Leopard and a Particular Point out), Busan, New York, London and elsewhere.

Without delay a personality research and a portrayal of a small ethnic group and its language, Hair, Paper, Water… develops a sublime, involving tackle the custom of ethnographic documentary. Its central topic is Cao Thi Hâu, a girl in her 60s, who’s a member of the Ruc folks of Vietnam’s coastal Quang Binh provice. She speaks in Ruc language voice-over all through, with particular phrases and phrases showing in red-on-black captions. Her house is an agricultural neighborhood that cultivates cattle and goats and harvests acacia bushes, their pulp used for making paper – one of many key recurring components that construction the movie. However the Ruc tradition has its conventional roots in cave dwellings, with Cao Thi Hâu herself born in a cave.

At the beginning, the movie appears to supply a balmily impressionistic view of Vietnamese rural life, with photographs of dense vegetation and of water dripping in cave mouths – however the preliminary quiet is disrupted by city noise, as Cao Thi Hâu makes her first go to to Saigon to take care of her granddaughter, who has simply given beginning. “What sort of place is that this, full of folks?” she wonders, as automobiles pace by and the digicam shakes in concord with the overall turmoil.

For probably the most half, although, the movie takes a contemplative strategy, with Cao Thi Hâu speaking us by sequences that supply elementary classes within the Ruc language – simply as a younger grandson of hers learns to learn Vietnamese and native schoolchildren research English phrases. What we be taught of Ruc comes within the type of the constructing blocks of a tradition rooted within the pure world, with filmed photographs illustrating phrases: ‘mountain’, ‘rain’, ‘flood’, ‘buffalo’, leech’ and, considerably, ‘dream’. Ruc information additionally emerges within the botanical knowledge that Cao Thi Hâu imparts relating to the medicinal use of herbs and fruits.

Graux’s richly colored 16mm pictures favours excessive close-ups that discover the materiality and texture of objects and faces, whereas Truong’s modifying usually emphasises fragmentation, transient photographs coming throughout like particular person components within the primer of Ruc information. However there are longer sequences, notably a ship journey by the area in one in every of its annual floods – with bushes and the tops of highway indicators rising from the water. There’s additionally a euphoric sequence through which Cao’s grandson runs on a seaside in livid winds.

There isn’t any particular reference to the Ruc folks or their language being endangered, however we get the sense that the movie is implicitly contributing to their preservation by making them seen. Channelling their depiction very a lot by the phrases, information and expertise of Cao herself, the administrators current their movie as being at the least partly an insider view. In any other case, the immersive impact is akin to that created by outsider observers of Asian cultures, for instance the film-makers of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (Paravel and Castaing-Taylor et al) and Galician director Lois Patiño in his Samsara – and lovers of their work will definitely discover rewarding kindred materials right here.