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 world of Terence Davies.

DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES (1988)
The lives of an English working-class family are told out of order in a free-associative manner. The first part, "Distant Voices", focuses on the father's role in the family. The second part, "Still Lives", focuses on his children.

From the programmer
“Cinema is all death. Just can you tell me.. any movies in which death does not appear or at least get mentioned?” - “No way”, I fired back while trying to think of a movie which we both had seen. “The Long Day Closes, there’s no death in that film.” - “Well... except for that film.” - my friend smiled slyly. As he waved goodbye, I started thinking about it. I realized that death was in fact a big theme in that film, as even the name suggested a sense of loss.
Both “The Long Day Closes” and “Distant Voices, Still Lives” are directed by Terence Davies, and both use the director’s childhood as their backdrop. If Davies is the main character while his father does not appear at all in “The Long Day Closes", in “Distant Voices, Still Lives", his father is present while he is not. Both films are a kind of memory simulation, revisiting events non-chronologically often triggered by music and sound. In both films, death plays an important part.

Now, I’m still not sure why I uttered the name of a film that had much to do with death while I was pressed to come up with one that didn’t; and I’m not sure either why my friend had agreed to my answer so easily. I’m just glad to have memories about those films still - films that are simulations of memory.
Another thing I’m not sure about. When I tried to think of a movie to show for Christmas, and I don’t even celebrate Christmas, I thought of “Distant Voices, Still Lives” - a film in which Christmas appears… only in a scene or two.
I am going to show it anyhow.

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: 85 minutes
Post-movie discussion available

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.”