Doha Film Festival 2025

Hair, Paper, Water…

International Feature Film Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

Nicolas Graux, Trương Minh Quý / France, Belgium, Vietnam / 2025 / 71 min / Unknown / DCP / In Vietnamese / Arabic, English subtitles
Themes: Creative Documentary
Rated: Parental guidance is advised for viewers under the age of 13. Individuals under the age of 13 are not admitted into cinemas unless accompanied by an individual aged 18 or older.

Description

In a remote Vietnamese village, an elderly Rục woman remembers being born in a cave more than sixty years ago. As seasons turn, she tends to her grandchildren and threads their days with the sounds of a language on the verge of vanishing, names of plants, and lullabies that carry entire worlds. Cooking fires, river water, and forest paths trace a map of belonging, while dreams return like tides: her late mother’s voice still calling her home across the porous line between past and present. In gestures as modest as washing a bowl or braiding hair, memory endures; the everyday becomes a vessel for what might otherwise slip away.

Directed by Nicolas Graux and Trương Minh Quý, ‘Hair, Paper, Water…’ is a meditative journey through remembrance, loss, and oral tradition. Shot on 16mm in close collaboration with the Rục community, the film listens as much as it sees, allowing myth, language, and landscape to overlap and breathe. The film is both an act of preservation and a cinematic offering to those who live between silence and song. It invites us to witness the fragile resilience of inheritance and how culture is carried hand to hand, voice to voice, even as certain worlds fade from view.

Director

Nicolas Graux

Trương Minh Quý

Credits

Producer

Julie Freres, Thomas Hakim, Julien Graff

Cinematographer

Nicolas Graux

Editor

Trương Minh Quý

Cast

Cao Thị Hậu Cao Xuân Doanh Cao Thị Hiệu Cao Thị Bát

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