Nguyen Trinh Thi—Day One

Nguyen Trinh Thi’s trilogy on Indigenous cultures in Vietnam—Letters From Panduranga (2015), Fifth Cinema (2018) and How to Improve the World (2021)—explores the idea of landscape as a witness of history. These films employ non-linear forms of storytelling to interrogate representation in ways that point to, and ultimately subvert, dominant narratives.

This screening will be followed by a dialogue with filmmaker Nguyen Trinh Thi and Gallery curator Phoebe Scott. 

 

FIFTH CINEMA

Vietnam | In Vietnamese and English with Vietnamese and English subtitles | 2018 | 56 min | M18 (Nudity)

Fifth Cinema is an essay film based on a 2003 lecture by Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay, “Celebrating Fourth Cinema”, which proposes the need to identify an Indigenous cinema that is outside the traditional national narrative of modern nation states. He argues that it should also be distinct from First, Second, and Third Cinemas—Hollywood, European art house, and Third World cinemas, respectively.

Expanding on this proposition of a Fourth Cinema, Fifth Cinema is a deeply personal portrait of Vietnam, and what Indigenous cinema might be like from Nguyen’s particular perspective as a citizen of Vietnam and the world, and as a filmmaker, an artist, a woman, and a mother.

In the film, the artist’s own moving images are interwoven with found footage of popular movies, government films, newsreels, home movies, and YouTube videos, which reflects local, official histories and external viewpoints on Vietnam. In providing space for subjective and collective memories to co-exist, the film confronts issues in a Vietnamese context, but also in ways which are universal.

Fifth Cinema premiered at the 9th Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art (APT9), Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, since then has been exhibited at many film festivals and arts spaces, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019–2020).