Sur la route des fantômes

“For many years, my idea of Vietnam was distorted by the filter of my imagination. From Paris, where I was born, I perceived the landscapes, faces and voices of my father’s home country as a kaleidoscope confusion of images of war. With my schoolfriends, the Vietcong’s ability to resist and finally triumph over the American giant gave credence to my pride and gratified as best could be the questions I had on my identity. Today, these ghosts of childhood’s memory are superimposed by a very real present, whose images I gathered in the rain-flooded countrysides of North Vietnam near to the Chinese border. “Sur la route des fantômes” is an autobiographical film, a unsure game of mirrors showing the reflections of my childhood stories mingled with the tangible reality of an apparently unchanging land, a land where the Vietnamese peasants seem to have been rooted since the beginning of time. Yet, behind their ancestral gestures and apparent serenity, lie individual destinies and tragedies shaped by war… and, little by little, these rise to the surface.” (Daniel Nguyen Van)