A grandmother floats homeward in ‘Hair, Paper, Water…’

Early scenes of Mrs. Hậu visiting this fast-paced urban environment are chaotic and imposing. Motorcycles rush through the crowded streets as the filmmakers undercrank their vintage 16mm Bolex camera, giving the footage a sped-up feel. Conversely, the calmness of nature is self-evident across the movie’s numerous images of Mrs. Hậu at home, teaching her grandson various words and phrases in her native tongue—which appear translated in bright red letters in Vietnamese in the center of the screen, and are further subtitled in English below—making language a central facet of the movie’s inquiry.

The world around Mrs. Hậu is tender and mysterious, something Graux and Trương capture in their observant frames, as their subject passes down both knowledge and myth, and her grandson repeats them in broken Rục, one syllable at a time. From bedtime stories to personal anecdotes, even to home remedies, Mrs. Hậu’s discombobulated monologues are maternal in nature, and deeply loving. Her gentle voice feels entirely in tune with the natural world, from the drip-dropping of water on leaves, to the cooing of birds each cloudy morning.

The documentary was written and directed Belgian filmmaker Nicolas Graux and Vietnamese director Trương Minh Quý.

Courtesy of New York Film Festival

However, the film isn’t as simple as a mere sociological study. Its observations are rooted in the linguistic coding that Trương previously attempted to explore with his riveting docu-fiction piece Nhà Cây (or The Treehouse), in which a fictitious filmmaker from Mars in the year 2050 explores the disconnect between moving images and the purely oral traditions of remote tribes like the Rục, whose history is almost entirely divorced from moving images. However, where The Treehouse sought to present this divide as an impenetrable boundary, Hair, Paper Water… (right from its evocative title) seeks to bridge this cultural gap, and presents the Rục language in a way that audiences accustomed to visual storytelling might better understand. 

When Mrs. Hậu mentions animals or other simple ideas to her grandson—“monkey,” “tiger,” “water,” and so forth—the block lettering against a blank screen becomes a photograph unto itself. This forces us to experience recorded images, or their cultural equivalent, as the Rục people might: purely as words, sensations, and memories. There are no monkeys or tigers to be found on screen, and although water features plenty (few filmmakers seem to love capturing it as much as Trương), its most potent moments take the form of sounds disconnected from the images themselves. 

In "Hair, Paper Water…" Mrs. Hậu lives in a rural village, where her family visits from a nearby city.

Courtesy of New York Film Festival

The vintage Bolex camera Trương and Graux used, in combination with the project’s remote nature, didn’t allow for synchronized sound, so the movie’s aural landscape had to be recorded and produced after the fact. However, the filmmakers never attempt to imitate sync sound and its reality; instead, there’s always a slight lag here or there, drawing attention to the artifice. Rather than direct close ups of Mrs. Hậu or her grandson speaking, the camera captures them obliquely, through details like their hair, their hands caressing tree barks, or  their feet planted firmly in the wet earth, emphasizing their connection to nature. The disembodied sounds become a soundtrack of sorts, creating emotional rhythms through a wistful tale of a grandmother trying to keep her culture and traditions alive through her grandson, in a world that moves far too quickly.

All the while, Mrs. Hậu speaks of being lured back to the cave of her birth by her dead mother, a river journey on which she takes her grandson near the end of the film, and which results in deeply moving scenes of the natural world passing overhead. In the process, Hair, Paper Water… becomes imbued with a sense of ritual, as though the camera weren’t just capturing trees, rocks, insects, and so forth, but embodying an intangible spiritual relationship to these things, as though they were forgotten legends in a world of smog and steel—loving creatures and objects, whose mere echoes could call us home.