Another City

Produced by the Luang Prabang Film Festival, "MEKONG 2030" is a collection of short narrative films that envision the future of the Mekong River from five different national and cultural perspectives. Set in the year 2030, they aim to both entertain and inspire audiences to actively protect this critical life source.

Utilizing the banality of Vietnamese state radio broadcasts, The Story of Ones gives a face and a sense of place to the unseen and offers a personal counterpoint to the officially sanctioned. Like entering a roomful of stories, the viewer steps into an unfamiliar space guided only by the sound of the radio tuning in to lifestyle programming, call-in shows and radio dramas. The portraits and settings layered atop the aural landscape create questions, provide humor, offer context and withdraw explanation of what once seemed clear before entering the room.

MRS. NGUYỆN (a Vietnamese blue collar retiree, who once worked in East Germany as a labor export worker), returns to Berlin where she inherits a cremation urn with her German ex-husband’s ashes and his pet slow loris monkey (CU LI). After managing to smuggle both the urn and the pet Cu Li back to Vietnam, MRS. NGUYỆN embarks on a journey retracing the steps of her memories to scatter her husband’s ashes at the hydroelectric plant where they first met.

Stories told along the river: a woman reunites with her ex-lover at a hydroelectric plant; meanwhile, a young man travels downstream to a temple in search of a cure for his insomnia.

The video creates an odd story, in which the old monitor is dragged around the precinct of an old French building while screening some ‘breaking television’ footages from Youtube.

In the dune landscape of a cemetery, or is it golf course? Past and present converge in the search for a grave.