- This event has ended.
Join us for a screening of NUOC (Water) 2030, a film set in the near future when water levels in the vast and beautiful coastal regions of Southern Vietnam have risen due to global climate change. South Vietnam is one of the regions most affected by climate change, which causes as much as half the farmland to be swallowed by water. To subsist, people must live on houseboats and rely solely on fishing with a depleting supply. Huge multinational conglomerates compete to build floating farms equipped with desalination and solar power plants floating along the coastline to produce the needed vegetables that have become highly priced commodities. The film follows a young woman as she tries to find out the truth about the murder of her husband, whom she suspects has been killed by the people of a floating farm. On the journey, she discovers the secret of that floating farm – it employs genetic engineering technology to cultivate vegetables that can be grown using salt water and thus can be produced much cheaper. However, this untested technology can have dangerous health consequences that the farm wants to hide. The chief scientist of the floating farm in question – the main suspect in her husband’s death – is her ex-lover. Ultimately, she discovers different versions of the “truth” about her husband’s death and has to make a dramatic decision without knowing the absolute truth.
Immediately following the screening. Professor Stephen Levin, Associate Professor of English at Clark University, will moderate a virtual talk-back with the film’s director Minh Nguyen-Vo.
Admission is free and open to the public.
Sponsored by the Environmental Humanities Research Collaborative through the Higgins School of Humanities at Clark University
About the Director
Minh Nguyen-Vo grew up in Vung Tau, a small coastal town in South Vietnam during the war in the 1960s. With the arrival of the American troops to fight communism that took away the idyllic beach and sand dunes where he and his friends used to frequent, he started spending a great deal of time in his family’s movie house that was founded by his grandfather. For an eight-year-old boy, it became a window to the outside world where real violence can be turned into fantasy. Minh pursued higher education in France where he obtained a BS in aeronautical engineering from Université de Poitiers. He continued his studies in the US and became a physicist with a Ph.D. from UCLA. He first worked in acoustics then quantum electronics. The cinematic window seemed to be closed for him. Witnessing his father dying and his son growing up inspired him to return to cinema with his first feature Buffalo Boy.
