Hanoi Docfest 2017

From Hanoi DocLab & Goethe-Institut Hanoi

Hanoi DocFest is Vietnam’s only annual festival dedicated to independent creative documentaries, experimental and hybrid films.

At Hanoi DocFest, we believe in a cinema of individual voices, and each year we bring to the audience independent works from Vietnam, as well as ones from around the globe - works in which we see powerful potential of creativity and of a vast and generous cinema.

This year's festival has an important structural change: the program will last for a week and will take place all over the city to give the audience a broader perspective of what's happening in the independent film scene. At DocFest 2017, you will find films that contemplate the many aspects of the social and the personal, manifested not only in an informational route but also in unique formal approaches. We are honored to be jointly organizing a two-day symposium dedicated to cinema of the region, titled "Time, Space, and the Visceral in Southeast Asian Cinema", with the Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network. Speakers will include Philippa Lovatt, Gaik Khoo, Jasmine Trice, Mariam Lam, Hitomi Hasegawa, Sow-Yee Au, Davide Cazzaro, Merv Espina and Thaiddhi, and on the Vietnamese side, we will welcome Síu Phạm, Trương Minh Quý, Trần Ngọc Hiếu, Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Trần Duy Hưng and Trần Trung Hiếu. We will also have the pleasure of welcoming Birgit Glombitza, the art director of Hamburg International Short Film Festival, who will introduce us to the contemporary aesthetics and current trends of short films through three screening programs and presentations. Furthermore, our schedule includes an intensive three-day field recording and sound design workshop led by Ernst Karel, a sound engineering specialist from Harvard University's Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL).

During the weekend, we have scheduled two main screening programs: "Then and Now" and "Portrait". Here, the audience will travel through the different landscapes of Vietnam, the Gia Lai region with Drowing Dew - a collaborative project between Art Labor Collective, Trương Quế Chi and Đỗ Văn Hoàng, the Mekong area with "Flat Sunlight" by Lena Bui, the street of Khâm Thiên in "March 23" by Phạm Thị Hảo. They are the stories that we believe, to a certain extent, will paint a picture of the Vietnam in which we are living and witnessing its many changes.

In closing, we hope to see you at Hanoi DocFest 2017, to talk and share with the filmmakers your vision of the world, and participate in this meaningful moment of Vietnamese independent cinema.

For updates, visit the festival's page.