Hair, paper, water...

“Night”, “Fire”, “Water”, “Cave”. These are the opening words on the screen in Hair, Paper, Water… Words that name, words that repeat, so we can learn to speak, so we do not forget. This is the promise made at the very start: a promise of guidance, a hand leading us from the beginning. The beginning where a voice teaches language, where hands gather plants that nourish, where a home offers a shelter. The film returns to origins, or perhaps to the moments that lie at the beginning of each human life, when the world is first learned, touched, and named.

In continuation with the themes of his previous works, the director Trương Minh Quý explores the meaning of home, the lives of Vietnam’s remote communities, and the tension between memory, change, and political history. Hair, Paper, Water… is his first feature film in collaboration with his partner Nicolas Graux, and it was awarded the Pardo d’Oro in the Concorso Cineasti del Presente and the Pardo Verde Special Mention at Locarno Film Festival 2025.

“Rục” is the name of the language. “Rục” is the name of an ethnic minority living in Quảng Bình province, Vietnam. “Rục” literally means “water trickling through rocks and caves”. Indigenous to the region, the Rục people were unknown to the world until 1959. From then until the 1970s, they experienced forced relocation and integration under the Vietnamese government.

Madame Hậu, a Rục woman, narrates her life as she goes about her daily activities. Through her and her grandson’s voices, we see how each generation inhabits a different physical space called “home”: from the cave of the great-grandmother, to the rural house of the grandmother (Hậu), to the city unit of the daughter, and finally towards the uncertain, undefined future of the grandson. Each generation lives in at least two different versions of “home” as a spatial entity. The transition is not just a change of location but a complete shift in the paradigm of living. Madame Hậu, born in a cave, was later forcibly moved to a house in a rural village where she now resides. Nonetheless, she continues to speak of the cave, recalling it as a lived reality alongside her present life. It is worth remembering what “cave” signifies here: geographically, the Rục homeland consists of vast limestone mountains, caves, lakes, rivers, and tropical forests, where living in caves was not a vestige of “cavemen”, but an adaptation to the environment, a continuity with the landscape itself.

The story opens with Madame Hậu traveling to Saigon to visit her daughter and new-born grandchild. Here, the familiar cinematic images of bustling cities fill the screen: endless motorcycles, crowded streets, highways, towering buildings, and throngs of people. The significance of this sequence lies in how it frames urban life. On the one hand, distances are defined by motorised transport rather than the human scale. On the other, the apartment building signals density, mass habitation. Observing as an outsider, Madame Hậu reflects on the fragility of apartment buildings, whose walls feel weak, full of “holes” that fail to provide the solidity of a cave. As the director explained at the award ceremony: «This film is about homecoming. And her home, where she was born, is in a cave. So she comes back to her home. But that childhood home is now only in memories.»

Her daughter, who grew up in the village house, now inhabits a nhà cấp 4 (“level 4 house”) in Saigon. These low-rise buildings, historically designed for factory workers, are composed of small, single-room units. They are significant because they are rooted in the form and function of rural agricultural homes while adapting to urban realities. In their symbolism, they function as a transitional space, neither rural home nor high-rise apartment, but a bridge between the countryside and the city. At the heart of the narration lies the grandmother’s rural house, a space where she and her grandson peacefully co-exist. Here, neither passes judgment; the perspective remains quiet, focused. The use of a vintage Bolex camera with 16mm Kodak film softens and blurs the edges of every frame. The narrative lingers in the sensory world of medicinal plants, where learning unfolds through words, nature, and the presence of animals, creating a tactile, meditative rhythm.

Beneath the simplicity of daily life, political and social realities emerge in conversation and surroundings. A billboard in the countryside reads «Reducing poverty is the responsibility and duty of the people themselves», while the grandmother tells her grandson: «if you study until 12th grade, the army will feed you». Hints of the future remain uncertain – not only do we not know what form of home the boy will inhabit, but also the trajectory his life will take. The grandson carries with him the memories of the cave, the rural house, and the city unit, one inherited by choice, another imposed, the last survived. Each leaves its mark, shaping a sense of home that is fragmented yet alive. As director Trương Minh Quý reflects: «By making this story, we wanted to return to the beginning – the beginning of cinema with this elementary camera, and the beginning of how we look at life, like children, full of excitement […]. But going back to the beginning is not to be stuck in sentimentality or melancholia. It is to remember, to never forget who we were, how we used to live, and how we are living now.»