Welcome to The Hanoi Social Club's latest event, CineMà Ngoài Trời - outdoor cinema in the candle-lit garden of our 100-year-old house in the old quarter.

Not just any movie night, CineMà Ngoài Trời is a carefully curated exploration of the great movie directors, from household names (Chaplin, Ozu, Hitchcock) to arthouse favorites (Fellini, Anderson) to slightly less heard of (May, McElwee). The movies have been chosen for their storytelling strength - each movie stands on its own as an example of great cinema. Take your cinema knowledge next-level!
Curating this series is Hieu Tran, former program manager of DocLab, co-curator of DocFest and Queer Forever film festivals, producer, director and cinema-lover. Hieu will introduce each movie, and assist with post-movie hangout over a wine to get the discussion happening.


Our cozy garden awaits!
This week, CineMà Ngoài Trời invites you to the cinema of John Carpenter.

THE THING (1982)

A team of American scientists investigate the empty, destroyed base of their Norwegian counterparts in Antarctica, only to discover a terrifying life force that can take the form of its prey.

From the programmer

There are always chance encounters, somewhere. The first time I saw John Carpenter’s work, The Thing (1982), I’d had not in the slightest any urge to watch it; his cinema was not mine - the genres of horror, action, sci-fi. Many years later - because I stopped watching him - I rediscovered him in Assault on Precinct 13 (1976).

It may seem contradictory now to screen and promote a film that I could scarcely recall. The best thing I could say about The Thing is that I’ve become a fan of Carpenter's works. A feeling urges me to show it rather than a favorite. The thing about a chance encounter is you never know when it hits, so you just have to take a deep breath and dive in. Perhaps it'll be this time round.

When: 7:30 PM, Thursday, Nov 05, 2020

Where: 3rd floor garden, Hanoi Social Club, No 6, Alley Hoi Vu, Hoan Kiem, Hanoi

There are 3 ticket packages:
Just ticket: 50k
Ticket and drink (juice/tea/coffee): 80k
Ticket and food: 140k (come at 6:30 to make sure you have time)

In English (spoken) and Vietnamese subtitles
Duration: 109 minutes

POINT OF DEPARTURE

In my months drifting about in New York City, I found a shelter in the theatre of MoMA - the Museum of Modern Arts, where the series *An Auterist History of Film had been happening. Not paying heed to the history of the films, I let myself wallow in their magical light. The films of Fassbinder, Powell & Pressburger, Ozu, Huston, Visconti, Hitchcock, Bergman, Mizoguchi, Welles… came to and passed through me, leaving traces of memory which inform me of my fate with cinema. While thinking about a film program in 2020, I felt it was somehow an appropriate time for me to return and bring forth that wondrous sensation, so that perhaps in some corners of the theatre, a stranger will be going through that same feeling I could hardly describe with words. I want this program to be a history of us strangers.

*about the Auterist History of Film, taken from MoMA’s website:

“This ongoing screening cycle is intended to serve as both an exploration of the richness of the Museum’s film collection and a basic introduction to the emergence of cinema as the predominant art form of the 20th century. The auteurist approach to film—articulated by the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s and brought to America by Andrew Sarris—contends that, despite the collaborative nature of the medium, the director is the primary force behind the creation of a film. This exhibition takes this theory as its point of departure, charting the careers of several key figures not in order to establish a formal canon, but to develop one picture of cinematic history.”