Monday 27 June sees the world premiere “cine-concert” of Esther Johnson’s bold and innovative new feature documentary Dust & Metal at Sheffield DocFest 2022. It’s a Vietnam story but don’t expect any of the clichés of apocalyptic western war movies set in the country. The focus here is on bikes, not guns.
Johnson made her archive-driven film in close collaboration with the Vietnamese Film Institute. The documentary also has a special new electronic score composed by Vietnamese-American musical visionary Xo Xinh.
“Vietnam is a place I’ve always been fascinated by,” Johnson declares. “I’m very interested in film history and also working with archive film…and I think Vietnam film history is a little bit of a gap in many western film histories. We don’t tend to have seen that many Vietnamese films. I wanted to learn more and I very much wanted to go and make a film in Vietnam,”
A few years ago, Johnson was part of a British Council organized R&D trip to Vietnam. “There were around six of us. I was the filmmaker/artist of the group and there were some programmers and curators,” the director (who combines her filmmaking with her work as a professor of Film and Media Arts at Sheffield Hallam University) remembers.
During the trip, Johnson travelled far and wide in the country, meeting Vietnamese artists and filmmakers and visiting cultural institutions. She made contact with the Vietnam Film Institute (VFI). “I was really intrigued about what films they might hold and the possibility of maybe working with them.”
Johnson’s earlier documentary Asunder (2016), about an English town in the North-East during the First World War, was also archive-based, so she had experience of this style of storytelling.
Why the focus on bikes? “When I was a kid, I used to get National Geographic. I always remember just so many pictures of bicycles and of being intrigued by this,” the director says. When she was in Vietnam, she noticed bikes and motorcycles everywhere. The country has more motorbikes than any other south-east Asian country. These vehicles play a crucial part in the life of the country, providing “personal freedom” and often keeping communities together.
“And bicycles were really important as well for the various wars in Vietnam, for moving all sorts of supplies,” Johnson adds. She wanted to make a film which offered “a different narrative” of Vietnam and she saw the bike as the perfect vehicle through which to do so.
After the first Vietnam trip, Johnson applied for funding from the British Council. This enabled her to return to the country and to “do a little initial filming.” She also had further discussions with the Vietnam Film Institute about working together. This was to be the first partnership the VFI had ever entered into with an artist or filmmaker working on a feature film – and so it was a groundbreaking endeavour.
“It has been a challenge. There is no precedent for creating this kind of work,” Johnson acknowledges. “There were no mechanisms or systems for how to do this. It has been a massive learning curve, really intriguing in seeing how we can make this work.”
As she set about her task, Johnson made sure that much of the material she found in the archive in Hanoi would be digitised and therefore made more widely accessible.
This material turned out to be high standard. Vietnamese filmmakers had learned their craft from Soviet teachers in film schools in Moscow. “Some of the material, you might think it was earlier than it was actually shot because a lot washes out on very old Russian cameras and on very old Russian film,” Johnson notes of the antiquated feel of some of the footage. “It has the sensibility of looking a few decades earlier.”
The archive includes animation, science documentaries and work from various different film studios. “And, of course, 2025 will be the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam. There’s a bit of resonance there as well. There is some footage in the film that hasn’t been digitised before that was shot in May 1975,” Johnson points out.
Dust & Metal has clips from around 70 different Vietnamese films. Johnson’s intention from the outset was to make a film which could be performed with a live score as well as shown later in cinemas. When she was in Hanoi in 2019, she and her co-producers from Live Cinema UK had attended Monsoon, one of the country’s largest music festivals. “We went basically scouting for musicians.”
The Vietnamese-American Xo Xinh was one of the artists featured, performing his electronic work. “We approached him afterwards. He was very excited and said ‘yes’ straight away.” On Monday 27 June at the Memorial Hall, Xo Xin will be on stage live with his Moog synthesizers to play his specially composed score for the film. “Hopefully, it will bring an exciting element. The soundtrack is like a heartbeat all the way through,” Johnson says of how the music sets the tempo for the images.
And, yes, Johnson hopes to stage similar “cine-concerts” in Vietnam as well. (The original idea had been to have the premiere there, but Covid scuppered that plan.)
During her research, Johnson also did accompanying interviews. For example, she spoke to Trần Văn Thủy, the renowned Vietnamese documentary maker whose insights feed into Dust & Metal.
Johnson has another project planned involving both Berlin and Vietnam. (It’s too early to provide details). Last year, she also collaborated with journalist Matthew Sweet and sound artist Nhung Nguyễn, on the short film/installation Liberation Radio, about US military deserters during the war in Vietnam. This screened widely on the festival circuit and also recently showed in Hanoi.
