Vietnamese documentary eligible for 2022 Oscar nomination

It recently won the Grand Prix Documentary Short at the International Cork Film Festival in Ireland to automatically make the long list at the Academy Awards.

The 26-minute documentary tells the story of a mother and son who traveled into a cave to escape the industrialization and globalization that have affected even the most remote areas in Vietnam.

Mailuki Films, the documentary's distribution agency, said on its website that the boy gets stuck in a situation of losing both his familiar ways of survival and identity after inheriting an intimate landscape that is being fast erased.

Before being qualified for the Academy Awards race, slated for March next year, the documentary was screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Netherlands and participated in several film festivals in Ukraine, China and Azerbaijan.

Vu was the only Vietnamese filmmaker to be chosen for the first Seed Lab, run by the non-profit Southeast Asia Fiction Film Lab to help aspiring filmmakers who are in the early stages of exploring feature-length film ideas.

He released his debut short film 'Nguoi Kien' (Ant-Man) in 2018.

His second project, the short documentary 'An Act of Affection' (2020), made its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland.