Thien An Pham's first feature film , L'Arbre aux papillons d'or was presented at the Cannes Film Festival 2023 's Quinzaine des Cinéastes and awarded the Caméra d'Or 2023 . The director, already familiar with the Festival, had won the short film prize at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes in 2019 for Stay Awake, Be Ready. He also presented L'Arbre aux papillons d'or at the Cannes Film Festival's Focus Copro film market and received support from the Hubert Bals Fund at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2019.
L'Arbre aux papillons d'or (The Tree of Golden Butterflies ) takes us on a journey of initiation through deep, rural Vietnam, with poetic overtones of an existential quest. The film follows a man named Thiện, charged with bringing back the body of his sister-in-law who died following a motorcycle accident in Saigon. Accompanied by his nephew Đạo, aged 5 and miraculously rescued from the accident, he sets out to find his brother who has been missing for several years.
This feature-length film reveals the striking beauty of Vietnam's wild and often little-known rural landscapes. Through an initiation to the discovery and search for faith, the director evokes difficult subjects such as mourning and the end of childhood, symptomatic of the loss of innocence. Tactfully evoked, this loss is at the center of the reflection - more specifically, the relationship maintained with grief at different stages of life is explored. Đạo's child character embodies the incomprehension and difficulty the mind encounters when conceiving this idea, to the point of becoming paradoxical when he seems more affected by the death of a bird than that of his own mother. The inconceivable is brought to light here, with all the questions that surround it: how do you keep faith after the loss of a loved one?
Using almost exclusively sequence shots, the director shows us moments in life that may seem rather empty, but which ultimately prove indispensable to the spiritual questioning the film invites us to ponder. The sensitivity of these moments is the essence of Thien An Pham 's work, and underlines the very personal dimension of this feature-length film .
All these themes encompassing L'Arbre aux papillons d'or (The Tree of Golden Butterflies) create a highly intimate, stunningly beautiful feature.
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