Two coal miners in love face their country’s buried trauma and reckon with their risky futures in this hypnotic Vietnamese queer romance.

Vietnam, September 2001: news breaks of planes hitting skyscrapers in New York. Meanwhile, in a spangled bower carved deep into the earth, young coal miners Viet and Nam are making love. They can’t stand their dangerous work much longer, but Viet frets that Nam’s plan to emigrate to Europe with the help of a people smuggler is even riskier. Before he leaves, Nam asks Viet to help him find the bones of his father, a soldier who died in the 1970s war. Together with Nam’s hopeful mother and his dad’s old army comrade, they travel through forests towards the Cambodian border, guided by dreams and memories.

Premiering to rave reviews in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, Minh Quý Trương’s third film was banned in his home country – not for its queer themes, but because the Vietnamese government perceived its view of national history as “gloomy” and “negative”. But it’s a powerfully sensual film whose focus on the contrasting textures of its protagonists’ homeland is gorgeously rendered in 16mm film. Meditative, even hallucinatory, Viet and Nam resonates on an unsettling, subterranean level and invites comparisons to Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

“Entrancing … Delicately invokes the haunting presence of the past … and offers a richly personal blend of the authentic and the abstract.” – Screen Daily