Queering the censorship: A (self)-investigation through the first-person perspective of an experimental filmmaker in Vietnam.

Through my first-person perspective as a queer experimental filmmaker, this project asks the question of how we, the community of Vietnamese radical audio-visual artists, have been encountering different types of censorships imposed by the Vietnamese government, Vietnamese society and ourselves. I work off the radar in Vietnam, where queer bodies and freedom of expression are practically non-existent. I represent the new voice of queer artists who make limitless aesthetic choices to expose unapologetically explicit bodies of my sex. Not only that, I have expressed critiques on my social system through impersonal aesthetic strategies. I am situated inside a community of contemporary Vietnamese radical audio-visual artists. The loosely-connected community can be divided into three subgroups: indie art-house filmmakers, social activist documentary filmmakers and experimental filmmakers. At present, the last group includes none except myself and very few others. Not only do we produce audio-visual artworks without conforming to the propagandistic ideology of the Vietnamese state singly led by the communist party but we are financially independent from the mainstream commercial filmmaking market as well. I have been coping with three simultaneous layers of censorships. They are the regulative ones from the government, the moral ones in disguise as taken-for-granted assumptions from Vietnamese society, and my self-censorship. In my community, our creating processes, film works, auteurs' voices, practitioners' lives, communal centers, and ecological chains are also intervened, censored, repressed, erased, banned, threatened, punished, shut-down or destroyed by different governmental censoring bodies as a matter of fact. Yet, the situation is no longer a one-way imposition from the censors' octopod arms in the digital age. It has now become an open battlefield for claiming artistic, personal, and national identities from multi-sides, through many push-and-pull factors, in which we - the artists of this research project - are not merely treated as conventional underdogs. This project makes use of queer theories, avant-garde theories, and censorship theories. Meanwhile, it applies methodologies of first-person documentary, found-footage collage, documentary with fictionalized elements, and performance-based video. The objective is to investigate minutely the ongoing encounters between the censored and the censors in Vietnam. It would answer in detail other questions such as how different types of censorships have mechanized inside our past and present audio-visual artworks. In the micro scope, which variants of identities have been born on Vietnamese screen and in its society? In the macro scope, how does this particular situation of film censorship reflect the true system of a turbulent society? Beyond that, how will particular artists such as myself cope with and transcend these censorships while creating new transgressive audio-visual works in different formats inside Vietnamese territory? The project will result in a feature experimental film of at least 75 minutes with four major parts respectively basing on the quartet of above-mentioned methodologies. The entire project is designed from the first-person protagonist who is its own queer auteur. In that way, it digs out novel understandings on perspective theory in audio-visual storytelling. By putting a camera into the hands of the censored, the project re-examines the role of those who have been much neglected throughout international censorship literature and rethinks how cameras can give rise to self-empowerment. By acknowledging the autobiography and gender of the protagonist auteur, the project articulates the avant-garde role of queer artists towards our artistic ecosystems. Politically, its gaze subverts the prejudice of victimizing the queer bodies inside our living societies.

Keywords:QUEER STUDIES, DOCUMENTARY, EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA

Disciplines:Documentary film, Experimental film, Performance art

Project type:Collaboration project