There is a gentle, almost casual flow to Ha Le Diem’s remarkable documentary Children of the Mist, a naturalistic rhythm that seems to settle the film in place. The audience is carried along with it too, gradually enveloped by a lulling sense of ease and familiarity as the mountain mists roll through the rural communities of Tonkin, North Vietnam. It is in these placid pastoral scenes, among the quotidian tasks and duties, the jovial community celebrations and the fractious family squabbles, that Diem chronicles the experiences of one ordinary girl, helping her parents work, playing with friends, attending school and worrying about her love life.
Di is just 13, on the brink of puberty; indeed, so subtle is the current of time pulling us through Diem’s film that it hardly registers until after the credits have rolled that she’s evidently reached her adolescence by this point. She plays a light-hearted role-playing game with friends and they explain to Diem that it is based in reality: every Lunar New Year, young men and adolescent boys “kidnap” teenage girls and effectively trap them in marriages. Vietnamese law sets the legal age for marriage at 18 for women and 20 for men but here, among the Hmong ethnic minority, custom often takes precedence over law. It happened to Di’s older sister, never seen in this film but kidnapped at 14 and now 17 and pregnant with her second child. It happened to Di’s mother too — she looks, to Western eyes, no older than a young mother herself.
Child brides are, alas, hardly rare in our world, even today. And there is, at least, a way out for some Hmong girls dragged into this wretched affair: they can refuse, though they rely on their would-be groom to agree. We see this sweet, humorous girl, confident, affable, giving her drunken parents and unfaithful boyfriend far more respect than their behavior sometimes warrants; we see her grow, begin to assert herself more, value her education over her family’s stagnant business in indigo production. She develops opinions, harbors aspirations, starts to become something of the adult she will, eventually, be. But she’s not an adult, yet through a combination of rebelliousness and blithe irresponsibility, she finds herself kidnapped by her boyfriend, himself also only a child.
This is, ultimately, a wrenching documentary due to Diem’s dogged, sensitive work in embedding herself among people she comes to know, understand and love. Moments never appear rehearsed nor self-conscious, the real people in the frame really living their real lives as Diem part observes, part participates. She’s particularly astute in capturing scenes emphasizing community and connection, multiple figures in view, their physical and emotional relationships expressed through their body language and proximity. One perceives the personal ties between individuals as they go about their daily lives, whether the situation be usual or unusual – a stern, sympathetic teacher talking to a sheepish student, rowdy bickering between drunk young men, a young boy lovingly escorting his infant sister indoors after she hurts her head, before assisting an elderly woman slaughtering a chicken. His sister’s cries, disappearing into the distance, are still audible in the first few seconds after the edit between scenes – there’s that flow, tying everything together, a graceful elision of time.
Diem’s approach isn’t all grace and simplicity, though. She openly challenges the common ethics of documentary filmmaking by blurring the boundaries between the documentarian as active participant and quasi-protagonist and the documentarian as objective observer. At first, it’s merely the admission that she, in becoming a part of her subjects’ lives, has thus become a part she must acknowledge. They speak to her and of her, so although Children of the Mist is not about her, in being about this community and this young girl with whom she develops a significant bond, it’d be dishonest of Diem to omit herself. Eventually, she abandons conventional ethical codes altogether and decides to intervene in circumstances unfolding before her. Others only rarely attempt to prevent her from filming and their attempts are unsuccessful.
What results is quite extraordinary. Diem has, to get all sentimental about it, led with compassion in her dedication toward chronicling truth. Nobody in this film is perfectly good or perfectly bad, and Diem has respect for all – Di’s hopeless, terrible parents, her clueless boyfriend and his pushy family, all observed and depicted with honesty and empathy. She doesn’t get them to act like the camera’s not there because it is there, an acknowledgement engendering a degree of verisimilitude quite rare in documentary filmmaking, or just filmmaking in general. This is a very special work, illuminating, educational and deeply, profoundly emotional.
Photo courtesy of Film Movement
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