Before Midnight Section

Black Canvas 2017

Vietnam is a country that has undergone several violent stages in its history as a nation, due to both internal problems and foreign invasions, the most recalled by the collective unconscious and the cinematographic art being the war it waged against the United States in such unequal conditions . KFC, by the director Lê Bình Giang, shows many of the current consequences of this conflict, which although it meant the military defeat of the northern power, also implied the triumph of American culture in the Asian country. The consequences of that triumph were disastrous for the Vietnamese society, something that Bình Giang expresses crudely in an honest film.

There are many stories that KFC presents us, characters from different social classes, straight and some workers, others delinquents, but all crossed by the Western heritage, represented in one of the iconic products of modern and cosmopolitan cities, fast food. The raw of the story is interpreted intensely by the protagonists, which together with the documentary tone sometimes given to us by photographer Vinh Phúc Nguyễn, with cameras in hand that closely follow the characters, present a truthful account. Likewise, the light remains in a dirty chiaroscuro, such as the consciousness of the individuals who populate these postcards of a society without hope.

It is a strong, urgent film that transcends the country in which it is made to talk about violence and loss of the most essential values ​​of humanity in the globalized world, where life is worth nothing and the future is seen with a pessimism chronic. There are no longer normal people seem to tell us the director, only the oldest, relics of a lost world, now all have a dark side in a city without god or law, where materialism is the rule of life, betrayal, loneliness surrounded of millions. An attractive film, which despite the rawness of their scenes you can not stop looking, in that voyeuristic masochism that invades our senses when we see worlds that we think distant, but that we can find them just steps from our house.

Pablo Jofré López / Historian and Audiovisualist