The thrill of a 16-mm image immediately causes us to hesitate as to the nature of the film opening under our eyes: a documentary or poem, an experimental film or a daydream singing the prose of the world? Hair, Paper, Water… is an unclassifiable object. The filmmakers film as if the movie camera had only just been invented and they were the first to use it. We first see a woman who arrives in Saigon from the Vietnamese countryside to give a hand to her daughter after childbirth. Then, close to the cave where she was born, we see her teaching her grandson the vocabulary of her native tongue, which is as much an act of transmission as a primary gesture of naming visible and invisible things – river, tiger, sky, mother’s milk, thinking, forgetting. The nature of the film is unveiled little by little: Hair, Paper, Water… is a meditation on the present and memory.
Aisha Rahim
French premiere
