First Light

My uncle and his family live in Germany. Their temperature-controlled home is filled with foreign plants, disintegrating photographs, handwritten letters, surveillance cameras, scanners and music. From Berlin, he watches the sun rise every night in his hometown in Vietnam where his mother sleeps.

Exploring the interface of a video surveillance programme, the cursor frames and enlarges the ill-defined silhouette of a women sweeping away dead leaves in a garden. Generally, surveillance images never arrive alone; they are often surrounded by troublesome questions. Who is watching? What malicious purpose is controlling these frames? What truth is hiding in them?  We quickly realise that, here, something quite the opposite of crime and punishment is involved.  Now, a man is tending tropical plants in his living room. He then takes out some old family photos, deteriorated and musty, which he scans and keeps in his German flat. From his native Vietnam, he has also kept some song sheets and letters that point to a separation and a persistent link. This man cultivates a memory as if cultivating a garden. All the suitable tools are used to help it blossom. What is fascinating are his green fingers; the infinite love that prompts him to set up the means of cherishing a mother over six thousand miles away. And Phuong Thao Nguyen in turn, “there where the river divides”, lends an emotional depth to the cinematic language; plays on the intensity of the interlinked distances; the mismatches between writing, voice and subtitles; to the point of turning an inopportune pixelization into a hypnotic and soothing respiration.

Antoine Thirion