Everyone Wants The Same Things
The Hanoi Film Festival began last night at a large government building two or three blocks from the Movenpick. I was happy to attend in my natty suit-and-tie and be part of the throng. The opening-night event was professionally handled and designed, and it was entirely pleasant to hang with Hanoi’s elite and learn a little about this and that. People clapped as I walked up the red carpet for no reason other than it was the polite or spirited thing to do. I smiled and felt mildly embarassed.
Opening-night festivities of film festivals are exactly the same the world over, and if I was running a film festival I would deliver the exact same routine. And opening-night attendees are the same; ditto the pre-screening schmooze hour and the post-screening after-party. With a few minor cosmetic chances I could have been at any film festival anywhere. Everybody wants to be famous and well-dressed and respected and desired.
Anyway, I was standing in the upstairs hall and listening to Hoang Tuan Anht, Vietnam’s Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism, give a speech about the aspirations of the festival and of Vietnam in general, and a thought occured. I looked around at the middle-aged men in tuxedos and women in beautiful ball gowns and various expats and guests amiably chatting and the waiters and busboys running around, and I thought to myself, “The United States fought a war and lost the lives of 58,000 men to stop this?”
The people running this event are technically Communists and that was once a fearsome term to some, but who cares now? There was once reason to be concerned about the bureaucratic rigidity and corruption of a system dedicated to fighting capitalism but look at this country now, just trying to survive and prosper and get along. People are the same the world over. People change, societies adapt, money ebbs and flows, prejudice fades.
The U.S. fought a ruinous and tragic war so that the fathers of the people currently running things in Vietnam could be prevented from unifying the country and, in the minds of the U.S. hawks and conservatives, from helping to perpetuate worldwide Communist domination, which of course went out the window in 1989 and ’90. The left saw through the crap in the ’60s and early ’70s but now even the dimmest people in the world realize that the Vietnam War was an appalling and sickening tragedy caused by blindness and obstinacy and willful ignorance.
I wish I could say that the opening-night film, a fanciful thing called Hot Sand about a magical mermaid, was good or even half-decent. I’d hoped it might aspire to the level of Neil Jordan‘s Ondine (’09) or Ron Howard‘s Splash (’84)…nope.
Sonja Heinen of the World Cinema Fudn and Berlinale co-production market
Ignorant foolishness. The (accurate) fear was that communist Vietnam would turn into a paradise like Kim’s North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Mao’s China, or Castro’s Cuba. No one- NO ONE, especially not your 60′s & 70′s “left”- expected Vietnam to go the route of Deng’s China, and eventually come to care more for money than murder. The people of Vietnam lucked out, big time, unlike those poor souls still trapped in Pyongyang or Havana.
Had Uncle Ho had his way, Vietnam would be just another impoverished backwards shithole. For some reason it isn’t. Maybe America ended up killing enough of the true believer revolutionaries to stop the really evil bastards from doing too much damage. No good fortune for those who lost the war, or the hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled, or the hundreds of thousands jailed- and still jailed- by the communists in Hanoi, but at least you can have a film festival in the country now. Yay, Hanoi.
Hey Correcting Jeff, how many millions of people do you need to kill to prevent millions of people from being killed?
“People clapped as I walked up the red carpet for no reason other than it was the polite or spirited thing to do.”
CHRISTOPHER WALKEN POWER!
Well THIS is gonna be a great thread.
“People clapped as I walked up the red carpet for no reason other than it was the polite or spirited thing to do.”
Come on, Wells. Your reputation precedes you.
The Vietnamese know your anti-fattie stance all too well. Haven’t you noticed how skinny people are in Hanoi? You are a kindred spirit.
Nothing lends critical perspective to the Vietnam war like hanging with a bunch of “Hanoi’s elite” twenty five years after the failing Vietnamese government adopted market-based reforms.
“Everybody wants to be famous and well-dressed and respected and desired.”
Just like Sam Worthington! YEP YEP.
‘People are the same the world over. People change, societies adapt, money ebbs and flows, prejudice fades.’ – Jeffrey Wells