Quý Trương Minh
Les Attendants - Film - 15min - 2020
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 22
Film
It is a slagheap where men come looking for sex. Each man waits for another like an animal waiting for its hunter. Short encounters. Aren’t encounters beginnings for something more: love? A homeless man wanders around in the same location, looking for water and for a desire unknown even to himself. He is alone — a lone animal. He sees men having sex from afar. Decades ago, too, this place was full of men: miners. Miners who migrated to this country to work in the dark to earn black money and to die sudden deaths.
Among the men who go inside this slagheap to have sex, there are miners’ children and grandchildren.
Generations of men crash on the ground like coal, pretending to be strong, yet so fragile: they are not coal, they are glass. Men finish sex. They have to go. Here is not their home but here is home for these homeless.
Sexual need crushes material need. Mouth needs water. Dick needs dick. Heart needs love. But love is a glass broken without even a touch. He is waiting. He is waiting in this slagheap where decades ago miners tramped around as soldiers marched on battlefields. He migrated to this country too, but from where? From where – it doesn’t matter anymore as he will never return to where he is from.
Quý Trương Minh
Quý Trương Minh was born in Buon Ma Thuot, a small city in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. His narratives and images, located between documentary and fiction, personal and impersonal, draw on the landscape of his homeland, childhood memories, and the history of Vietnam. His films have been selected for international film festivals and exhibitions such as Locarno, New York, Berlin, CPH:Dox, Viennale, Clermont-Ferrand, Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Busan. He won the main Art Prize at the 20th VideoBrasil (São Paulo) in 2017. Currently he is experimenting with new mediums and ideas at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in France.
Production
Acknowledgments
Christophe Meyer, John Badalu, Indiegogo Contributors, Xiao Dong Guo (Levo Films)
