Hair, Paper, Water... (Tóc, Giấy và Nước…)

In the Vietnamese documentary Hair, Paper, Water…, you enter an unfamiliar world where even a falling drop is audible. Belgian director Nicolas Graux and Vietnamese director Trương Minh Quý follow Cao Thị Hậu—born sixty years ago in a cave—as she teaches her grandchildren the endangered Rục language: word by word, memory by memory. It is cinema as transmission—intimate, patient, and tender. The weight of an everyday gesture is as profound as that of a life lesson.

Shot on 16mm with an old Bolex camera, the film feels homemade: the frame breathes moss green, skin, and paper fibers. These are not polished tableaux, but lively, grainy snapshots that make time tangible—like opening a family archive scented with rain. This fragile beauty was immediately recognized at Locarno, where Hair, Paper, Water… won the Golden Leopard in the ‘Filmmakers of the Present’ section, reserved for a director’s first or second film.

Though the film is visually striking—Graux himself served as cinematographer—the true magic happens in your ears. The tactile sound design (by Ernst Karel and Trương Minh Quý) lets you hear the images: the texture of leaves, mud underfoot, water dripping in dark hollows. Rather than a lush score, the film offers an acoustic composition written with natural sounds and breath. A sensory learning process emerges: you don’t just follow the growth of her grandson Doanh’, you feel how language and landscape resonate together. Drop by drop, memory becomes music. When Hậu finally travels toward Saigon, stretching family bonds across generations, the tone shifts from pure observation to quiet emotion. Plants and remedies (like the leaves of her traditional medicine) appear in brief close-ups; each shot is a gentle nudge to memory, each silence a breath before the next word. The result is a fluid family portrait, both humble and grand: cinema that preserves rather than explains, allowing you to experience how a language is passed down.

Hair, Paper, Water… is essential viewing for lovers of poetic nonfiction, but also for anyone who believes that sound has a body and that culture lives as long as it is spoken. Let your ears open your eyes.