Don’t Look Back (Khi Yêu Đừng Quay Đầu Lại)

April 1, 2011 by quyen

Vietnam 2010
90 min / color video
Vietnamese with English subtitles

Producer: Dinh Thi Thanh Huong
Director/Writer: Nguyen-Vo Nghiem Minh
Cinematographer: Joe Spezeski
Sound: Duy Julien Tran
Music: Tina Tinh, Vo Thien Thanh, Duy Tran
Editors: Joe Spezesky, Nguyen-Vo Nghiem Minh, Khoi Minh Lam
Main Cast: Ngan Khanh, Thanh Loc, My Duyen, Thanh Thuc

Inspired by modern dance and the Orpheus myth, Don’t Look Back is a ghost story that follows an ambitious dancer who is lured into a mysterious nightclub where she encounters an elusive saxophonist. They inspire one another in their respective arts and eventually fall in love. Struggles in their romance arise as they discover that the nightclub is a meeting place for dead spirits who seek to extend their physical presence, as does the saxophonist whose own ephemeral existence is hastening.

Minh Nguyen-Vo grew up in a small town in Vietnam during the war. To escape the fighting and atrocities, he spent most of his adolescence in the only movie theater in town, a small single screen venue. There, he was able to watch films from around the world. In addition to being a coping mechanism, cinema also served as escapist fare for this eight-year-old boy to see beyond his war-torn country.

As an adult, Minh moved to France where he received a Bachelor’s of Science in Aeronautical Engineering at the Université de Poitiers. He later continued his education in the United States and became a physicist earning a Ph.D. from UCLA. He was fascinated with the interaction between sound and light and it became his main research subject for many years. His passion to follow his ideas from many different perspectives brought him back to cinema or perhaps, it was cinema that came back to him.