As of January 1, Vietnam’s new film rating system allows the local movie industry to screen adult content.
According to VnExpress, the new rating system includes four classifications: P for general audiences, C13 for viewers age 13 and up, C16 for viewers age 16 and up, and C18 for viewers age 18 and up.
The system, which is modeled after a similar rating system in Singapore, was created in an effort to do away with “unnecessary cinematic censorship”, writes the news outlet.
In handing out film ratings, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism will consider a film’s profanity, violence, nudity, sexual content, gore and drug-related content. Gratuitous scenes of sex or violence will continue to be censored.
While this bodes well for the film industry, allowing filmmakers more creative freedom in their work, it remains to be seen how the rating system will work in practice. Though the new system had been in the works for three years before it was officially launched, just last year film censors proposed a ban on sex scenes which lasted longer than five seconds as well as full-frontal female nudity.
These measures will not be included in the new rating system, however film censors can be a fickle group. In 2015, censors unexpectedly pulled the erotic film 50 Shades of Gray from theaters. CGV, which had purchased the film’s Vietnam distribution rights, later screened a version in which all sex scenes were cut from the movie. A few years earlier, the now-famous local action flick Bui Doi Cho Lon suffered a similar fate when it was banned from theaters for its violent content.
Vietnam’s previous rating system included just two ratings: G for general audiences and NC16 for films suitable for viewers 16 and up.
[Photo via YouTube user GalaxyFilmThienNgan]
