UPDATE: Congratulations to director Phạm Thị Hảo and producer Trịnh Đình Lê Minh on winning the Top Prize at Docs by the Sea Awards 2026 for their project Nostalgia for the Land!

Varan Vietnam is delighted to share that Nostalgia for the Land, a feature-length documentary project directed by Phạm Thị Hảo and produced by Trịnh Đình Lê Minh of the Varan Vietnam production team, has been selected for this year’s Docs by the Sea Editing Lab 2026.

The Docs by the Sea Editing Lab is an important development platform for feature-length documentary projects currently in the editing stage. This year, the directors and editors of six selected projects will work to sharpen their films into powerful and compelling narratives, before presenting them at the DBTS Forum in front of international industry guests.

Nostalgia for the Land is a family chronicle spanning three generations, tracing how a family’s bond to their land slowly slips away as the pressure of survival pulls the young toward a life elsewhere. Returning to the red soil of her childhood, the filmmaker resumes a family chronicle left unfinished for twenty years, drawn back by the death of her nephew and the uncertainty it casts over those left behind.

Weaving together two decades of archives with the present coffee harvest, the film follows a Catholic family who fled poverty in the North for the post-war New Economic Zones. Across generations, the story moves from elders who cleared wild terrain by hand, to siblings venturing deeper into the forest as land becomes an increasingly volatile commodity, and finally to the youngest generation, who are gradually priced out of the dream of staying.

As the harvest season comes to an end, the film becomes a personal reckoning for the filmmaker herself. As the only sibling who escaped through education, she confronts her own guilt while watching the youngest generation repeat her history – migrating toward urban boarding houses and a future increasingly severed from the land.

The selection of Nostalgia for the Land for Docs by the Sea Editing Lab 2026 marks a meaningful milestone for the project and a source of joy for Varan Vietnam as we continue to accompany independent documentary filmmakers. We hope that through the Editing Lab, the film will continue to grow into a deeply resonant work, opening up questions of family, memory, migration, land, and the quiet losses within contemporary Vietnamese life.