Plays at Cinema Diverse Sunday September 28th 4:30PM THEATRE ONE
By Valerie Milano
Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) 9/26/25 – Vietnamese filmmaker Trương Minh Quý’s Viet and Nam (Trong lòng đất) is a haunting and meditative portrait of love, memory, and loss. The 2024 Vietnamese Filipino romantic drama, starring Pham Thanh Hai and Dao Duy Bao Dinh, unfolds deep in the coal mines of rural Vietnam, where two young men cling to each other in secret while carrying the weight of their nation’s history.
Set in 2001, the story centers on Viet and Nam, miners and lovers, who find fleeting intimacy a thousand meters underground. Their bond is tender yet precarious, shadowed not only by the dangers of their profession but also by the ghosts of the past. Nam is torn between staying with Viet and following through with his dangerous plan to escape Vietnam via human smugglers, while Viet struggles with the inevitability of their separation.
But the film’s scope stretches beyond personal romance. Nam’s search for answers about his father, a soldier lost in the war, drives the characters on a pilgrimage toward the Cambodian border. Alongside Nam’s mother and a veteran who may hold the key to his father’s fate, they journey through landscapes heavy with silence, grief, and unresolved trauma. The specter of Vietnam’s turbulent history—its unburied dead and unhealed wounds—hovers over every frame.
Quý’s filmmaking style is uncompromisingly slow and atmospheric. Shot on 16mm, much of the imagery is cloaked in shadows, demanding patience from the audience. The subterranean cinematography is both suffocating and breathtaking—coal dust shimmering on skin, tunnels glowing like constellations, intimacy emerging from darkness. These visuals evoke a trancelike state, balancing beauty with unease.
Though banned in Vietnam—not for its depiction of queer love, but for its bleak interpretation of recent history—the film resonates as a work of resistance. Its reflections on generational sorrow, environmental decay, and the cyclical nature of loss give it a weight that lingers long after viewing. Unlike the dreamlike transcendence often found in the works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Quý’s vision is grounded in heaviness, pulling the living toward the realm of the dead.
Viet and Nam is not an easy film, but it is a profound one. Its quiet gravity rewards those willing to surrender to its rhythm. At its core, it is a story of two men in love, fighting for a future against forces—political, historical, and spiritual—that seem determined to swallow them whole.
