Screening: Chronicle of a Summer

From the organizer: 

In the screening, we are happy to have Myriem Alnet as our guest speaker. Myriem Alnet is an urban designer and cultural entrepreneur based in Ho Chi Minh City. With a background in international development, she nurtured her first interests for urban issues in the Mediterranean before she moved to Southeast Asia to compare parallel discourses and developments between the two regions. Myriem is also founder of An Ordinary City, an independent initiative based in Ho Chi Minh City aimed at sharing knowledge about cities through cultural action.

“Are you happy?”
With this simple question asked to passers-by in Paris, sociologist Edgar Morin and anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch started a new documentary genre that they called “cinéma-vérité”. The idea seems naïve: to understand what the French youth of 1961 thought about life, future, happiness and the way they projected themselves. The documentarists engaged in a series of beautiful conversations with young people form their circles of acquaintances who discuss their lives – a Holocaust survivor, an Italian immigrant, a student from Ivory the Coast, a Saint-Tropez starlet...

More so, the film is a question about the documentary genre – its moral engagement and aesthetic forms. Following in the steps of Dziga Vertov and his Kino-Pravda (remember, “Man with a Movie Camera”?), Morin and Rouch’s uninhibited capture of Paris was extremely influential for the following generations of documentary and film directors.

Directors: Edgar Morin & Jean Rouch
Year: 1961
Duration: 85 min
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxk-fg771r8
Language: French with dual Eng-Viet subs.

Entrance fee: VND 50,000 ($2.2). Students: VND 30,000.