Bringing Vietnamese landscapes to film
On primetime, the film “Walking in the Bright Sky” has attracted the attention of audiences as it explores the lives, personalities, and unique cultural features of ethnic minorities. Through the lens of two young people Pu (Thu Ha Ceri) and Chai (Long Vu), the story of the youth of the Dao ethnic group appears vividly. With the poetic and majestic setting of Cao Bang, this work stands out from other modern TV series airing at the same time.
Or the movie “The Unique Path” also impressed with its investment in the setting, building chases and hunts from the city to the mountains. The costumes of the characters in Ban May are imbued with cultural identity, mysterious, and curious.
Previously, Vietnamese cinema had the film “Silent Under the Deep” with a new perspective on the passionate love story of a H’Mong couple in the highlands of Ha Giang. Watching the film, the audience not only admired the majesty of the cat-eared rocky mountains, the vast fields of buckwheat flowers, the colorful flared skirts of the H’Mong girls, but also learned more about the unique customs of the people here.
Indigenous culture is expressed through festivals, wedding and funeral customs; through daily activities such as cutting grass, forging hoes, grinding corn, and horse riding. Actors Phuong Oanh and Dinh Tu also practiced shelling corn, grinding corn, riding horses, and running on bumpy mountain roads full of sharp rocks.
The film “The War Without Borders” also chose many settings as villages near the northern border with majestic mountains and rivers. Images of terraced fields stretching out, and the simple markets of the highland people also appeared in the film “Battle of Minds”, which was mainly made in Yen Bai.
Every film about ethnic culture carries the mission of promoting culture, bringing indigenous beauty closer to the public.
Many challenges
To get eye-catching footage, the difficulty for the film crew when making a film based on indigenous culture is the harsh filming conditions. The crew of “Silent in the Abyss” once shared that they had to film on dangerous cliffs, with poor material conditions, lack of clean water, cold weather and countless difficulties when the whole crew had 50-60 people.
The crew of “Walking in the Bright Sky” also said that they spent months searching for the setting, struggling to travel to the highland villages. In “The Unique Path”, the beautiful scenes were set on steep paths on cliffs, forcing the actors and crew to travel for many days in the primeval forest to film.
Despite being new and not yet exploited much, films about ethnic minority culture face many difficult problems when making. One of them is ensuring the authenticity and scientific nature of indigenous cultural customs.
Right from the time it aired, “Walking in the Bright Sky” was criticized by viewers for its costumes and depiction of the Red Dao people’s customs that were not consistent with reality. Many viewers who are Dao said that Dao people’s costumes are divided into casual and formal. However, in the film, Pu wears formal clothes to herd buffalo, while Chai wears a red bib and two pieces draped over her back - a style of Dao women’s formal wear.
The scene where the Dao people use the word “you” (you) with the officials in the film also made the Dao community disagree. Not to mention details such as sloppy headscarves, men in the village preferring men over women... are also said to have a negative impact on viewers' perspective of the Dao people.
Previously, the film “Silent in the Abyss” also received many comments about the characters’ voices and costumes. Long-standing customs such as wife kidnapping and wife robbery often receive mixed opinions when broadcast.
Without careful research and reference from a historical and cultural perspective, films based on the indigenous culture of the Northern mountainous ethnic groups can easily become patchwork and deviate from reality.
