Forgetting Vietnam

Earth and water, leaving and returning, remembering and forgetting, ancient myths and the “liquid changes” of rapid globalization: “the founding gesture of two” plays out as a fragile yet sustaining equilibrium in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s portrait of Vietnam, made to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of the American war. Together earth (đât) and water (nu’o’c) form the Vietnamese word for country. These two elements are the structural threads of an eloquent film that travels the length of the country to offer poetic ground-truthing in an age of tourism, and asks, Who eagerly remembers? Who hastily buries and conceals?