INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL: SCREENING INTRODUCTION By Xiaojian Zheng

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is the debut feature of Vietnamese director Phạm Thiên Ân. It is a transnational production involving film companies from Vietnam, France, Singapore and Spain, and has won several prestigious international awards this year, including Best First Film, namely “Golden Camera” at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, and Best Film in the Roberto Rossellini Awards at Pingyao International Film Festival. 

The entire film unfolds around a poetic and slow-paced narrative. It tells the story of protagonist Thien who travels with his five-year-old nephew who is not looked after by his father, to his rural hometown in the hinterland of Vietnam, where his sister-in-law who died unexpectedly is to be buried, and where he also returns and seeks reconnection with his past. Interpreting his own work, director Phạm Thiên Ân divides the film into two parts. The first part presents the protagonist’s return to his hometown and his resettlement; while the second half is intertwined with his dreams and illusions, in which he embarks on a spiritual journey into the Catholic world of his hometown, with a sense of mysticism. What links the two parts is the trajectory of Thien’s action which, rather than being dramatically at the service of a particular narrative purpose, loosely unfolds across the vast landscape formed by the fusion of modern and historical symbols with nature. Thien's journey of drifting allows the film to explore another theme: the exploration of individuals’ attachment to the place where they live in the context of globalisation.

In this way, along Thien’s journey of self-exploration, the film presents us with a historical cross-section of contemporary Vietnamese society, where everything seems to be in a subtle state of flux and iteration – people’s everyday life and mobility are being transformed and redefined by globalisation and urbanisation; traditional wedding and funeral etiquette and order, are supported and perpetuated by modernity and digital technology; in an old farmhouse not far from the road reconstruction project, oral histories seem to be vanishing along with the ageing of a veteran. These images and imageries visualise the ongoing historical progress of globalisation whose permeability is embodied in the material and cultural texture that forge the sense of place. 

Rather than simply serving as historical and spatial background for the development of the narrative, globalisation and modernisation are also where the film primary driving force behind the storytelling comes from. We can presume that it is the expansion of global capitalism that forced Thien to leave home at a young age, and to seek opportunities for survival in the vast urban world of Saigon; and it is also this invisible force of history that arouses in him a sense of alienation from locality, when he tries to resettle himself in his hometown. His dissonance with his homeland drives him to rebuild his connection with a place that is both familiar and unfamiliar to him. Engaging with the dilemma faced by Thien, the film brings us not only into visual contact, but also into physical and mental contact with the nature, religion and history of the place. The film achieves this by developing a recurring visual motif: the camera often departs from the narrative at precise moments, as if endowed with life and an organic body in motion, which enables us to follow the camera, and to encounter place and space at both material and abstract levels. 

The film offers a unique visual experience where we can see that the spaces caught between modernity and tradition, which are materially and culturally composed of heterogeneous visual elements that refer to different historical stages, indicate that sense of place is always in the process of being reshaped by various historical forces. Thus, the filmmaker seems to refuse to give any definitive answer, at an essentialist or romantic level, in terms of the protagonist’s attachment to place. In contrast, he reminds us that the production of place is always historically constructed. This very point is also confirmed by the way the film addresses Vietnamese Catholic culture. As a cultural entity imported along with Western colonial movements, modernisation, and globalisation, Catholicism is represented in this film as something that has long been integrated into the construction of local and individual identities, that is, a tradition at a relative level. Also, driven by different cultural, historical, and political forces, the material and cultural forms of existence of this tradition are inevitably changed and reshaped in the course of history. Traces of history and change are visualised in the film's depiction of local customs, such as Catholic weddings, funerals, and religious rituals.

Let’s follow director Phạm Thiên Ân’s unique artistic vision to walk into the historical depth and dynamics of the film’s engagement with the vast landscape, and with the sense of place of contemporary rural Vietnam, and enjoy the poetry and rhythm of the images.

Xiaojian Zheng

29 November 2023

Xiaojian Zheng, a former marketing practitioner in China for Hollywood films, is currently studying for a PhD in sociology at the University of Galway. Her research focuses on Place-Making and Digitalisation in Contemporary China.