ACF - Asian Cinema Fund

2017 Asian Network of Documentary (AND) Fund

LIST The Tree House

Synopsis

What does it mean to be an evanescent image in the memory? A thing to forget or a hint at something? The Tree House traces back to such an image. The image that the filmmaker had incidentally seen some 13 years ago: a lonely house in the mountain. The journey searches for the house in the filmmaker′s memory and while doing so, the present reality slowly unfolds the stories of the ordinary people who live silently in the godforsaken places in the mountains of Vietnam. It is the indigenous Ruc people’s nostalgia for the primitive world, back when the caves used to be their only house. It is the encounter with the new world of a man who had been living in the deep jungle for 40 years ever since he was born. And it is also the filmmaker′s memories of his own childhood home. The image of the house in the memory becomes something like a light in the dark night that leads and connects each piece of the stories.

Director's Note

I wonder myself for what kind of obsession could be so haunting, for 13 long restless years about a mere house upon the mountainside, that makes me so want to make a film about it? A clear-cut answer for the stirring of memory might be impossible to realize. Yet if there is a need to give an explanation, then it might be because I am always thinking of Home in its very all-encompassing term. Home as a shelter for our very memories. The act of making this film might be a way for me to find the connection between the home of the others and the home I hold within, thus, the meaning of home.

Festivals

2019 Locarno Film Festival - Concorso Cineasti del presente
2019 DMZ International Documentary Film Festival - Asian Competition
2020 International Film Festival Rotterdam - Bright Future Main Programme

Still Cut

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