From May 18 to 31, 2026, the film program VIETNAM: HERE & THERE will take place at Babylon Cinema (Berlin, Germany), bringing international audiences on a journey through more than 70 years of Vietnamese cinema.

Following the success of the two previous Vietnamese film seasons at Babylon Cinema in 2024 and 2025 – with 28 films, 64 screenings, and more than 2,600 viewers – this year’s program expands its scale with around 30 works ranging from classic cinema, independent films, films by overseas Vietnamese communities, to contemporary voices of Vietnamese cinema.

Curated by Lưu Bích Ngọc and Trần An, with the support of the Vietnam Film Institute, Like The Moon in a Night Sky, and the Centre for Assistance and Development of Movie Talents (TPD), the program is not only a screening event, but also an effort to revisit Vietnamese cinema as a space of memory, identity, and hope.

In the catalogue’s introductory text, the two curators write that the program is a way of asking the question: “How do we live with hope in the world as it is?” Hope here is not seen as something grand or abstract, but rather something present within the small movements of everyday life: a person searching for the meaning of “home,” a family preparing to leave their floating village, aging stage artists trying to continue surviving, or a letter sent to an absent mother in the northern mountains.

Notably, this year’s program includes several works by members and alumni of Varan Vietnam – films that carry a spirit of observing life, closeness to their subjects, and a deeply personal approach to documentary cinema.

With or Without Me (2011) by directors Trần Phương Thảo and Swann Dubus approaches the life of a young heroin-addicted couple in Điện Biên. Rather than portraying the characters simply as social cases, the film delves into the fragile spaces between love, dependency, and the desire for another way of living. In the program text, the film is placed alongside stories about “hope taking root in the most unlikely love.”

The Glorious Pain (2020) by director Lê Mỹ Cường and co-author Thanh Nguyễn follows one of the few remaining traditional Vietnamese opera troupes in the Mekong Delta. The documentary observes the lives of the artists behind the stage curtains — where characters once adorned in theatrical splendor return to their ordinary struggles for survival. In the catalogue, the film is introduced as the story of “the journey of a small classical Vietnamese opera troupe” and raises questions about the future of this traditional art form within a contemporary context.

Meanwhile, Dear Mom (2024) by director Hà Lệ Diễm appears as a quiet yet evocative image within the program’s curatorial text. The film is mentioned as “a letter written to an absent mother by a young Hmong girl in the mountains of the Northwest.” Within a program spanning many different periods and cinematic forms, the presence of the film feels like a small pause — a place where cinema returns to deeply personal emotions and human intimacy.

For many years, Varan Vietnam has pursued a filmmaking approach grounded in observation, listening, and respect for reality. The films presented in this program, despite their differences in subject matter and form, share a common characteristic: cinema does not stand outside life to explain it, but steps inside life to coexist with people and time.

At a moment when Vietnamese cinema is becoming increasingly diverse in both generations and cinematic languages, programs such as VIETNAM: HERE & THERE create opportunities for Vietnamese films to be placed alongside one another within a broader current – where cinema is not only the history of films themselves, but also the history of perspectives, memories, and questions that have never truly ended.