Berlinale Encounters: An exciting new cinematic voice from Vietnam: About Le Baos movie VI/TASTE.

We are in gloomy, bare cor­ru­gat­ed iron huts in Saigon, Viet­nam. Hard­ly any sun­light pen­e­trates in, every­thing is sparse, bare­ly fur­nished, the press release speaks of the “slums” of Ho Chi Minh City, as Saigon has been offi­cial­ly called since reuni­fi­ca­tion in 1976. I don’t know whether the Viet­namese offi­cials would also speak of slums, but you can see poor cor­ru­gat­ed iron huts out­side of the mod­ern and quite afflu­ent-look­ing down­town Saigon. Bass­ley (Ole­gun­leko Ezekiel Gben­ga) is an immi­grant from Nige­ria. We only slow­ly learn a hand­ful of details from his biog­ra­phy. First of all, we sus­pect that Viet­nam is not nec­es­sar­i­ly the typ­i­cal coun­try to which peo­ple from Nige­ria emi­grate. Then we learn that he has a son in his home coun­try with whom he occa­sion­al­ly com­mu­ni­cates a lit­tle via video call. We learn that his con­tract with a foot­ball club in Saigon was ter­mi­nat­ed after an injury. “I could­n’t keep you on the team. It was a tough deci­sion, ” said his coach. And now he moves into the cor­ru­gat­ed iron hut of four mid­dle-aged Viet­namese women. Their every­day life now con­sists of cook­ing, eat­ing, clean­ing, sleep­ing, tai­lor­ing – and hav­ing sex with Bass­ley. There is hard­ly any talk, every­one is silent – and there are a few things that always play a role that is dif­fi­cult to deci­pher: a hot air bal­loon, a giant sword­fish.

VI / TASTE is the first fea­ture film by the young Viet­namese direc­tor Lê Bảo, who grew up in a sim­ple tin shack in Saigon. He encoun­tered cin­e­ma by watch­ing for­eign films on a lap­top. He began mak­ing his first sim­ple short films, all of which were set in the area where he grew up. VI / TASTE was final­ly cre­at­ed in those places with lots of ama­teur actors. Giv­en this career, his debut film is an aston­ish­ing­ly elab­o­rate, arti­fi­cial, dif­fi­cult to access work. I would have guessed that it came from some­one who would have attend­ed ambi­tious, west­ern art schools.

Lê Bảo explains how his film was made: “The film con­sists of scenes, moments, vivid sketch­es – it’s a series of inter­con­nect­ed vignettes strung togeth­er and final­ly what appears on screen looks like a cross between keen-eyed obser­va­tion and a script­ed, care­ful­ly chore­o­graphed dream. ” The direc­tor explains that there is def­i­nite­ly an African emi­grant com­mu­ni­ty in Saigon. His film lives from rhythm, he explains: “Rhythm is a char­ac­ter­is­tic part of my visu­al lan­guage. When I imag­ine a spe­cif­ic image, it means I’m cre­at­ing a tan­gi­ble inter­ac­tion.”

Lê Bảo’s film is an unruly work that is not pleas­ing for a sec­ond and that only frees itself a lit­tle from the dirty con­fines and dark­ness of the cor­ru­gat­ed iron huts in the last third. The film tells of glob­al­iza­tion and emi­gra­tion, of iso­la­tion and being lost, of the loss of roots and of defense­less­ness. No, actu­al­ly it does­n’t tell about it, it scratch­es these top­ics, it sug­gests them, it tries to play with them, it comes across them. This dis­ori­en­ta­tion into which the direc­tor forces the view­er cor­re­sponds to the dis­ori­en­ta­tion in which the pro­tag­o­nist finds him­self. It is indeed vision­ary, dream­like and uncom­pro­mis­ing and of a direct­ness that is sel­dom seen in cin­e­ma. And Lê Bảo also man­ages to give Viet­namese cin­e­ma, which is large­ly unknown in the West, a sur­pris­ing, unfa­mil­iar voice.

CREW

Direct­ed by	Lê Bảo
Cam­era	Vinh Phúc Nguyễn
Edit­ing	Lee Chatametikool
Sound Design	Vin­cent Vil­la
Sound	Hieu To

CAST

Ole­gun­leko Ezekiel Gben­ga (Bass­ley), Thi Minh Nga Khuong (Mien), Thi Dung Le (Trang), Thi Cam Xuan Nguyen (Hanh), Thi Tham Thin Vu (Thuong)

„Taste” (Vị) by Lê Bảo has won the Spe­cial Jury Award at Berli­nale Encoun­ters.