CURRENTS

THE TREE HOUSE

ET IN THE YEAR 2045, MINH QUÝ TRU’O’NG’S LATEST FILM IMAGINES A FUTURE IN which the Earth is an alien environment. In the guise of a documentary, unfolds through the words of an unnamed (and unseen) filmmaker, who, having arrived on Mars, looks back on the images he’s captured of the Vietnamese countryside and his encounters with a tribe of indigenous Ru..c people. In ruminative voiceover, he reflects on how he might make a film from this “continuous train of images,” in which locals are seen farming, building, painting, and discussing various traditions with our off-screen interloper. But what begins as observational soon turns interpretive as the filmmaker begins to experiment with the footage, meditating on the philosophical dimensions of resembles a new kind of hybrid cinema, one in which the earthbound and the cosmic are not only linked, but indivisible.—