From left to right: Hoang Mai, Ngo Dang Tra My, Sarah Vandegeerde & Anh Thu
A recent trip to Hanoi led me to the doorstep of the Vietnam Film Institute, the organisation that preserves the country’s film heritage. Or rather, an Uber motorbike led me from my friend Anh Thu’s place, through the Vietnamese capital’s traffic jams, to the VFI’s headquarters, a modern building in Hanoi’s administrative borough. I was met there, under president Ho Chi Minh’s welcoming eyes, by the Deputy Director Ngo Dang Tra My and Hoang Mai, International Cooperation. They kindly agreed to sit down and chat with me for an hour – through the intermediary of my friend Anh Thu, who was translating – about the VFI’s work and their challenges.
Prior to this trip, my knowledge of Vietnamese cinema was limited to relatively recent international co-productions that had been traveled to international film festivals and European arthouse cinemas (The Scent of Green Papaya, Tran Han Hung, France-Vietnam, 1993, Caméra d’Or at Cannes Film Festival; Three Seasons, Tony Buy, US-Vietnam, 1999, Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Festival). The rest was a blank page I started filling during my visit to the VFI.
Bust of Ho Chi Minh at the VFI
The Vietnam Film Institute collects all films sponsored by the Vietnamese government since 1953. That year, almost a decade after the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam – more widely known as North Vietnam -, president Ho Chi Minh signed Decree 147/SL that officially marked the birth of the revolutionary Vietnamese cinema. The government sent students abroad to train as filmmakers and within a few years, built and equipped – with the support of other Communist countries, such as the USSR, China, the GDR or the Czech Republic – their own film studio and school.
The future of the Republic, still at war with South Vietnam and the Americans, was then very uncertain and all industries, cinema included, were working toward the construction of the nation. Reporters were sent to all corners of the country and to the battlefields to bring back images celebrating the regime’s accomplishment and discrediting their opponents’. The films would then be shown to the population, even in the remotest regions, through a network of provincial associations.
The difficult context had a direct impact on the industry’s input and the aesthetics of early Vietnamese cinema. Very few feature films (36) were produced between 1965 and 1973, compared to 463 information films, 307 documentaries, and 141 scientific films.
The legacy of the war is also felt through the identity of the VFI. The Vietnamese government had founded the institution in 1979 in order to centralise the acquisition and preservation of the nation’s cinematographic heritage (including audiovisual works, technology and related documents) and disseminate film culture throughout the country. It was placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Information and Propaganda, which is now the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Sports (to which the Cinema Department belongs).
VFI’s headquarters in Hanoi
Today, two sites dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of film culture remain: the VFI’s headquarters and the Ngoc Khanh Cinema House in Hanoi, and a smaller Film Research and Archive Center in Ho Chi Minh City, where the films produced by the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) between 1954 and 1975 are also preserved. As I learned during my visit, since dissemination of film culture remains central to their mission, the VFI still display important efforts to reach minorities living in the remotest areas of the country.
Today, 80,000 films lie in the VFI’s vaults. Documentaries and newsreels are the dominant genres. They are preserved on various supports, from tapes to 16mm and 35mm films, and more recently LTOs. These are kept in temperature-controlled vaults in Thạch Thất near Hanoi province. As the earliest films date from the 1950s, there is no nitrate in the collection.
The VFI has historically acquired cinematographic works through the government. Indeed, the film industry had relied completely on the State until the 1980s when Vietnam started opening up to the market economy. New opportunities have since sprung up for independent filmmakers as well as commercial production and distribution companies. This proved good news for the industry that gained in diversity and creativity, but less for the archivists.
Whereas the State owned de facto the copyright to the films they produced, independent films belong to private, for-profit stakeholders. Vietnam’s copyright laws do not differ much from their Western counterparts: the rights holders – the filmmaker, the producer, their heirs – have a complete monopoly over the reproduction and dissemination of the work for up to 60 years after the author’s death.
No exceptions have so far been provided that would allow for the preservation and restoration of films without the rights holders’ consent. The VFI thus has to pay to acquire new films, and can only do so 2 or 3 years after their cinema releases. The situation has worsened in recent years as they have had to limit their acquisition of independent productions from 5 to 2-3 films per year due to the reduction of their subsidies.
The VFI’s collections are full of gaps: pre-1953 films seem to have mostly disappeared, many others were destroyed or lost during the conflicts, and most recently, strict copyright laws put once again a large segment of Vietnamese film history at risk. The institution nevertheless remains an important resource: for the Vietnamese because it is the sole repository of banned Vietnamese films in the country; for the world because it preserves an extraordinary collection of films about their struggle for independence.
VFI’s restoration suite
Whereas extensive work has been carried out in America to open and discuss their archives about the Vietnam War, the VFI’s collections remain largely untapped and unknown. They would however provide new, refreshing perspectives on a violent conflict that crystallised so many opinions and influenced politics worldwide.
But things are evolving: the Vietnam Film Institute has recently set up its own digital facilities with a Spirit Telecine and Da Vinci restoration suite, and their first long-term project is the digitisation of films about president Ho Chi Minh. If we have been long enough far from Vietnam, we can now hope that a digital film future will bring us closer.
Further reading:
Further viewing:
Vietnam: Views from Home and the World by Kenji
Sarah Vandegeerde is a film archivist and restorer. She started working as an Operation Specialist at the BFI National Archive in 2017 after completing a MA in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image from the University of Amsterdam. Her other interests include copyright and institutional politics.
Cover picture: Altar dedicated to Ho Chi Minh in Bac Ha, North Vietnam Pictures: Sarah Vandegeerde
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