Việt and Nam

Việt and Nam begins underground, in the physical darkness of a coal mine where two young men can touch one another away from public view. Việt and Nam are lovers as well as miners, and Trương Minh Quý uses their relationship to connect labor, queer intimacy, migration, wartime memory, and the literal excavation of the dead. Nam plans to leave Vietnam through a dangerous migration route, but before departure he joins his mother and Việt in searching for the remains of his father, a soldier killed decades earlier. The search turns the ground beneath the characters into an archive: coal, soil, bones, dreams, and memory occupy the same imaginative space. Shot on 16mm, the film has a tactile grain that makes darkness and skin unusually material, while its structure slips between realism, dream, recollection, and historical echo. Cannes described the lovers as moving through mysteries of memory as they retrace a path to the past; Film at Lincoln Center similarly emphasizes how the private relationship opens onto national legacies. The result is not a war film with a queer subplot or a romance decorated with history. Love and history are both forms of buried material, and the film asks what can be carried away when leaving home requires abandoning the earth that contains one’s dead.

Synopsis

Việt and Nam work together in a coal mine and conduct their romantic relationship in secrecy. Nam is preparing to leave the country in search of another life, but his departure is tied to unfinished family history. His father died as a soldier, and the location of his remains is uncertain. Nam’s mother joins the two young men in following memories, dreams, and fragmentary information toward the place where the body may be buried. Their search moves between mine shafts, forests, family recollection, and plans for migration. As Nam faces the possibility of departure, the film binds erotic attachment to questions of what the living owe the dead and what homeland means when one’s future seems possible only elsewhere.

Watch for

• Watch how darkness functions differently in the mine, in intimacy, and in memory; the film repeatedly turns limited visibility into a condition for both danger and closeness.
• Notice the material links among coal, soil, bodies, and remains, which make excavation a literal occupation and a metaphor for confronting family and national history.
• Pay attention to the contrast between Nam’s desire to leave and the search for his father’s body, since migration and burial pull the character in opposite geographic directions.
• Observe the grain and exposure of the 16mm image, especially in low light; the film’s texture makes history feel embedded in the physical surface of the present.

Production notes

Việt and Nam was written and directed by Trương Minh Quý and selected for Un Certain Regard at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Cannes lists the film at 129 minutes and records a broad international co-production spanning Vietnam, the Philippines, Singapore, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, and the United States. That structure reflects the funding realities of independent Southeast Asian art cinema while the film itself remains firmly rooted in Vietnamese language, mining communities, war memory, and migration. Film at Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival page notes that the picture was shot on 16mm and later released in the United States by Strand Releasing. The handmade texture of 16mm is central to the finished work, allowing darkness, bodily closeness, dust, and landscape to retain a material instability that cleaner digital imagery would have changed.

Trivia

• The film premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2024, placing Trương Minh Quý’s work within the festival’s principal official selection.
• Cannes records eight countries in the production structure, an unusually broad co-production network for a Vietnamese-language independent feature.
• Film at Lincoln Center identifies the film as shot on 16mm, a choice that gives the coal-mine darkness and skin tones their distinctive grain and texture.
• The lovers are both coal miners, making the story’s recurring movement underground a workplace reality as well as a visual and historical metaphor.
• Film at Lincoln Center’s NYFF program states that the film was banned in Vietnam, so that censorship status should be cited to a specific exhibition source when discussed.

Legacy

Việt and Nam is a major contemporary film because it joins subjects that Vietnamese cinema has often treated separately: queer desire, labor, migration, battlefield memory, and the unresolved problem of soldiers whose remains have not been recovered. Trương Minh Quý does not organize those themes into a programmatic statement. Instead, he lets them overlap through bodies and landscapes, making national history inseparable from intimacy. The Cannes selection and subsequent New York Film Festival presentation gave the film immediate international visibility, while its reported censorship at home added another layer to the conditions under which Vietnamese independent cinema reaches audiences. The feature also expands the visual vocabulary of modern Vietnamese film through its commitment to 16mm. In an era dominated by digital production, the grain becomes more than retro aesthetics; it makes the image itself feel excavated, fragile, and unstable. Its combination of romance, underground labor, and the search for the war dead makes it one of the clearest recent examples of personal history and national memory inhabiting the same physical ground.

Find This Film

Search “Việt and Nam” with Trương Minh Quý and 2024. Cannes provides the authoritative Un Certain Regard identity and production record, while Film at Lincoln Center’s NYFF page documents the 16mm format, U.S. exhibition context, and censorship note.