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Trauma over Time in Hanoi
(Cu Li Không Bao Gio Khóc by Pham Ngoc Lan, 2024)
Work and travel arrangements have made me entirely miss the Singapore Film Festival, edition 2024. For this reason, the chance of seeing any of the opening screenings of Cu Li Never Cries, a most remarkable new film by Pham Ngoc Lan starring Minh Chau, Xuan An Ngo and Ha Phuong, went blank on me unnoticed. Sadly so — because after the shorts Blessed Land (2019) and The Unseen River (2020), Cu Li Never Cries appeared pregnant with promise.
Earlier, Pham Ngoc Lan’s film had won him the GWFF First Feature Film Award at the Berlinale 2024 — and for a time way too short, it had been showing on the film streaming platform Mubi. I kept missing it, until finally, courtesy of the Asian Film Archive, a division of the National Archives of Singapore, it was scheduled for one single additional screening, on a rainy Sunday afternoon in May, at the Oldham Theatre, 1 Canning Rise. Not the Sunday gig that makes one jolly and merry. Rather — saudade, Heimweh, nostalgia and the blues. But yes, that’s what we had come for.
The syllables cu li in the title refer to several things in Vietnamese: an unskilled native…
