Thao Nguyen Phan

First Rain, Brise Soleil expands Phan’s exploration of the Mekong region with a poetically woven-together narrative. The film, preluded by a quote from the Edo period Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, opens with the fictional narrative of a Vietnamese-Khmer construction worker who specialises in brise-soleil, the concrete lattices for shading and ventilating buildings that are common across the global South and that, in cities like Saigon, unite a vernacular building technique and traditional Vietnamese craftsmanship with a modern material linked to US domination. Through this fictional first-person narrative, the film addresses US imperialism in the region and the 1977–91 war between Vietnam and Cambodia. The film’s second half, set during the 18th century’s feudal wars, centres on a folkloric

love story between a Vietnamese medicinal healer and a Khmer woman that unfolds around the symbolic significance of a durian (or “thouren”) fruit, for which the Mekong Delta is a major production area. Contrasting the solitude of Saigon’s urban setting with the deceptively lush landscape of the Mekong, the video addresses romantic love from several women’s perspectives, producing a narrative that transforms and flows like the river itself.

By revealing the past and present violence and destruction that occurs in the Mekong delta, First Rain, Brise-Soleil proposes a gentler view of modernity that embraces the poetry and lyricism of indigenous knowledge and the region’s fragile ecosystem. –IW