Popular reviews

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★ 4

  A documentary with a sci-fi premise, The Tree House is an odd and loose form of cinema, taking on ideas organically and looking at the world spontaneously. Everything is uneven and yet that makes it all more personal and powerful. It is a piece on the minorities within Vietnam, yet it is a collection of anonymous bits, like a scrapbook of cultural exchange. The people feel seperated from time, as everything seems just in the moment it is captured. The camera lingers and observes. Colours and techniques bleed in and out, as The Tree House adopts so many styles on its journey through thoughts and dreams. The world is presented in abstract, and even switching to film negative when looking…

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  Review by Chris 🍉 ★★★★★

  "I slept better in the cave."

  definitely a slow movie -- and a short one at that -- yet still manages to be incredibly dense with thought and emotion. as a document of indigenous vietnamese people the movie does not really work, but I don't think that was the goal anyway (would it even be an ethical or achievable goal? would the Rục, Kor, etc. people even want that? who would it be serving and why?) so i wont speak on that, especially since I came into this with pretty much no knowledge about them in the first place. as an exploration of identity, ancestry, memory, and 'home' among displaced peoples in a post-war, post-colonial setting forced upon them however....…

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  Review by Thuy Hung Nguyen ★★½

  The biggest issue with The Tree House is in terms of perspective: the director leaves very little chances for the native people to speak for themselves. So, in effect, we listen to the director masurbating in his own thoughts, and his own interpretation of the native people - which, frankly, lends little credibility to the documentary. I mean, it's not like the director fails to examine his subjects; it's more like, we don't know how reliable his rambling thoughts are. We don't know how the native people feel about themselves actually.

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  Review by V. Lepistö ★★★★

  Our memories are so limited, our world is so beautiful. Image is one thing, being there (whether in spirit or physically) is another thing. The reason for art is here but it's not without restraints; the question of who is worthy and who is capable of filming other people's memories. Film can capture worlds but it can also distort them - film is also very vulnerable, capricious medium that can as easily change the world for worse as it can be used to increase our understanding of it. Are we who love cinema actually more limited? Are we limiting our understanding of the world by good but ultimately vain attempt to empathize and explore through images? Trương's film is incredibly calm but extremely restless. It's a meditation on cinema as memory and its mediator, a kind of ambitious attempt to comment on current stage of cinematic culture and its development with its possibilities and most of all its limitations.

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  Review by col_plimp ★★★

  A Land – A Movie
  Sans Lingua Franca-Liste

  
  Die Geschichten, die hier einige ältere Ureinwohner halb- bzw. experimental-dokumentarisch erzählen sind auf jeden Fall interessant. Zum Beispiel als im Vietnamkrieg die Soldaten kamen, zogen sich einige Familien in den tiefen Dschungel zurück und lebten dort bis heute extrem isoliert in Steinhöhlen und Baumhäusern - eine Familie, ein Bergkamm und Tal. Ein paar angebaute Früchte und alles was der Urwald hergab (z.B. Frösche, Affen) stand auf dem Speiseplan um die Familie großzuziehen.

  Heutige Umsiedlungsprogramme lassen viele Traditionen und Kulturen der oft sehr kleinen indigenen Gruppen schnell in Vergessenheit geraten. Und das das ganze kollagenartig in eine Sci-Fi-Marskolonisten-Erinnerungsfetzen-Story eingewoben ist (mit teils umgekehrten Farben) und in vielen verschiedenen Dialekten Vietnams vorgetragen wird, macht…

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  Review by Raul Marques ★★★★½

  Sci-fi indigenous meta-ethnography essay.

  Nolan's plots are easy, this is what hurts my brain trying to conceive how someone would even come up with such a concept, let alone execute it. Takes a while to get used to its rhythm, but despite the seemingly daunting aesthetic and textual approach, it eases onto the viewer (and slowly floors them) just on account of the gorgeous visuals and the poetic, humane ruminations on history, people and nature.

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  Review by Jack Russo ★★★½

  The roots of ethnography entangled with the live wires of science fiction framing, Minh Quý Trương going high concept to separate tradition from the advance of time even as the latter continues to consume through a slow-rot cultural assimilation. The deep forests are just as removed as the distanced future they're viewed from, but on the scale of time the collision of social integration is inevitable.

  Trương's work here is diary and essay, the personal of the time traveller engaging with the political of vanishing culture. Displacement inherent in the work as it all bleeds together in its dying fragments, the grain of his 16mm the weathers of age while archival, interview and observation footage forming memory of existence in…

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  Review by Film at Lincoln Center

  In Minh Quý Trương’s striking second feature, a man living on Mars in the year 2045 examines footage brought back from his encounters with an indigenous community in the jungles of Vietnam. As he experiments, his thoughts drift from matters of identity, aesthetics, and the politics of imagemaking, to ritual burial practices, to the seen and unseen forces that shape cultures. Combining elements of science fiction and ethnography, The Tree House is a powerful exploration of how time and environment relate to our understanding of home.

  See the North American premiere this Saturday & Sunday with Q&A.

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  Review by PeacefulDawn ★★½

  The most interesting part about this was the use of negative film, which made for a really cool contrast between life and death. But the rest was such a slog, even if it's funny to use Mars as a framing device for indigenous displacement.

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  Review by Ale ★★★

  Every time he looked up, he saw countless specks of dust floating in the light. The small particles of dust were like stars on a galaxy. This galaxy of memory dust would vanish with just a light wind.

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  Review by Charlie Chua ★★½

  30th edition of SGIFF
  Film #15: The Tree House

  Producers in attendance.

  I was expecting a lot more. A lot of fascinating ideas, but somehow falls short in expressing them coherently. Seems like an odd ethnographic docu-fiction with photographs and negatives awkwardly spliced together. 

  This is one of those films that made me feel like there’s something I missed. Perhaps I’m not reading into this enough to appreciate it fully. As of now I’m just really on the fence.

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  Review by adelaide ★★★★

  a gorgeous 16mm meta ethnographic documentary about the disappearing culture of the indigenous people living in vietnam. liminal, atmospheric sensory cinema, masquerading at the start as a "science fiction" film with its metaphor of displacement through a settlement on mars

  it gets really oblique and frustrating to watch at times, often repeating its points over and over again in different ways that did get on my nerves! like we get it, "the memory of these cultures and people are fading"! but ultimately as a whole, this film did so many interesting things, especially with the editing, sound design and meta contextual structure that i forgive it for its faults. every time it shifted between the plain documentary of the indigenous people and the meta commentary on memories and death, i got goosebumps.

  really worth seeing this in a cinema setting because i would've fallen asleep watching this at home - the film does get *really* tedious!