Young people with disabilities in Ho Chi Minh City are excited about the film “Lives Worth Living”
Ho Chi Minh City – The documentary Lives Worth Living (Lives Worth Living) by two American directors has just been screened in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, moving viewers not only with the efforts of the community of people with disabilities fighting for their right to equality, but also with the way the film was made. Many people ask: when will they get to see films like this in Vietnam?
Many documentaries, few screenings
Director Bui Thac Chuyen said that there are in fact quite a few documentaries about people with disabilities in Vietnam: “Life After the Page” (national press award, category C, 2011); “Hearts Without Disabilities”; “They Got Married”; “Father and Child”…
At the TPD Centre for Supporting the Development of Cinema Talent (Vietnam Cinema Association), many young people have studied and produced documentaries. Some films have entered international awards, such as “Father and Child” (a father who unfortunately had an accident and acquired a disability but still tries to make a living to raise his children); the film “They Got Married” (the love story of a couple with disabilities who overcome every difficulty to be happy)…
However, in Vietnam documentaries are rarely shown on television or in cinemas.
Director Phan Huyen Thu added that documentaries are always “overshadowed”. Many awards have been given to Vietnamese documentary filmmakers that only people in the profession know about. Even films that have won major awards, many colleagues who want to see them do not know where to watch them.
A scene from the film “Life After the Page”
This is also why audiences cannot access films about people with disabilities in Vietnam. Ms Nguyen Hong Oanh, director of IDEA (the Center for Research and Action for Inclusive Development), commented: today, images of people with disabilities are recorded only in short reports, holding up examples of good people doing good deeds, overcoming themselves, focusing on their resilience, so that other people with disabilities can learn from them and rise in life. That is still not enough.
“I really hope there will be films about the difficulties, barriers and discrimination that people with disabilities face every day” – Ms Oanh said.
More than five years for one film
Directors Eric Neudel and Alison Gilkey have just screened in Vietnam the documentary “Lives Worth Living”, telling the story of the struggle for equal rights by people with disabilities in the US.
The film takes viewers back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the struggle for equal rights by the community of people with disabilities in the US was at its most vibrant. The film praises the power of compassion and resilience, and what people can do to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Director Eric Neudel said he hopes people with disabilities around the world can unite, form a large community and fight for the equal rights of their community.
The film has no narrator; people with disabilities tell their own stories. The directors used all the characters' voices and linked them together to form an emotional thread.
The two directors spent five years gathering documents, witnesses and footage of people with disabilities that had been discarded as worthless. Director Alison Gilkey said they travelled to every city, and even to Mexico, to find precious footage for the film. “Do not look at people with disabilities with a downward gaze, or show contempt; instead, show them that their views are listened to,” Ms Alison said.
According to director Phan Huyen Thu, to make a film about people with disabilities, the issue the film raises is not pity or wailing. “For me, there are no people with disabilities, only people less fortunate than me. We live, and so do they, so I always place them above me, with no pity, only admiration.”
Director Bui Thac Chuyen shared that there should be more films about people with disabilities, not only documentaries, because more than anyone, people with disabilities are people of great resilience. “When something is taken from them, they are given something else.” People with disabilities need to be understood correctly and humanely, so that good films can be made that bring them into life with everyone else. However, those wishes still seem far away.
According to Tien Phong newspaper