Beat 1 contains two productively strange and playful films that explore the fantastical and absurdly humorous topography of Hanoi in transition. Teddy and Hoang devise situations, or “trajectories,” for their actors and put them on set. Their sets are real places in the city that most people can access, but few do. Existing only for a limited time, these spaces enable the staging of disruptive interpretations and the blurring of boundaries between the real and the imagined.

The parkour athletes of I Forgot! roam the abandoned houses of Thiên Đường Bảo Sơn, an extensive real estate development and theme park complex southwest of the city. The teens recognize the fit between their sport and the artificial terrain. In using it as parkour training ground, they show mastery over a knowledge of the alternative flows and trajectories enabled at this moment of transition. The film, in relying on non-actors’ ability to improvise, manages to capture their natural language usage, including slangs, idioms, and intonations. These linguistic “structures” are grounds for improvisation, which mirrors the physicality of parkour in its semiotic operation.

False Brillante is also captured in a “just before” moment: Hoang’s actors are put on the street, late at night, near morning. We know that it’s the small hours because all of the shop fronts are closed. Like the empty suburban homes, a street lined with shuttered shops composes a kind of liminal space. Though the film is shot in other spaces too, this liminality remains at its heart. The actions that unfold are non-sensical, but since they are being staged in real spaces, using real objects as prop, their absurdity is fitted into a network of common, self-evident significations. The use and the meaning of a pile of brick, for example, is an uncertain thing in this film. In other words, False Brillante is a little crazy, and it asks you to play along. Liberated creative impulses become light, like the clear air of a lonely night.

– Nguyễn Đình Tôn Nữ