Việt and Nam (2024) — Queer Desire Dragged Through Coal Dust and Cinematic Time

—or how Vietnam took Apichatpong’s flame, lit a cigarette with it, and walked into queer transcendence wearing miner’s boots

Girls, have you ever watched slow cinema and thought, “What the hell? Why is this pacing dragging me through existential dread like a corpse through wet soil?” I get it. Trương Minh Quý’s Việt and Nam unfolds so languidly that its title card doesn’t drop until minute 50. But hang tight, babes—this isn’t slowness; it’s cinematic refusal. A rebellion against spectacle, against legibility, against capitalist time. It doesn’t perform queerness for clicks—it lets it rot and breathe underground. Fall asleep if you must, but if you surrender to the drag (in both senses), the reward is rupture. This isn’t just a film—it’s queer asceticism.Think of it as endurance training for gay monks of cinema. Sit through the silence, and you’ll hear everything.

Apichatpong didn’t just invent slow cinema in Southeast Asia. He exploded it—then watched its spores spread across the region like glowing spores of queer ecology. While Thailand traded its soul for Netflix-ready sentimentality, Vietnam picked up Apichatpong’s ghost and whispered, “What if we went darker?” Films like Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell and now Việt and Nam don’t just carry the Thai torch—they ignite it into something new: unapologetically political, deeply queer, and so slow it becomes geological. Meanwhile, Thailand’s arthouse scene now chokes on its own festival buzz and dies fabulously offscreen. Vietnam didn’t just inherit Apichatpong’s legacy. It looted the temple and built a cathedral of coal.

Meanwhile, back home, Thailand feeds us How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, a melodramatic rebrand of funeral tears as nationalism. This isn’t Thai-Chinese identity—it’s content. And genuine Thai auteurs? Silenced. Ask the average Thai student who Apichatpong is and get a blank stare. Our education system taught us to consume art, not question it. Vietnam said, fuck that. They didn’t just lift Apichatpong’s flame—they set the algorithm on fire.

And now let’s talk queerness. Việt and Nam makes painfully clear how the Thai entertainment machine flattens queer lives into sanitized, lip-glossed BL dramas: profitable, palatable, and politely neutered. As someone who worked inside that machine, let me tell you—authentic queer voices are silenced. Industry execs push us out of “real cinema” with the same tired line: “Auteur? That’s for straight men.” Visibility becomes voicelessness.

And meanwhile, Vietnam gives us a queer kiss streaked in coal, labor, and silence. No music, no merch deals. Just raw, unprofitable intimacy. If Tropical Malady gave us finger-licking sex in the forest, Việt and Nam gives us a kiss beneath collapse. One smudged in grime and truth.

Gays, we’ve won—quietly, defiantly.

As a dual citizen born in the U.S. and raised in Bangkok, this film hits like a confession. Its characters—Vietnam’s working-class youth—aren’t dreaming of freedom; they’re digging for it. Migration isn’t opportunity—it’s escape. A joke about emigrating for “white dick” lands like a Molotov cocktail of postcolonial trauma.

The U.S. ravaged Southeast Asia during the Cold War, left it gasping, and now sells us back visibility wrapped in whiteness. These boys aren’t just fleeing poverty. They’re chasing fantasies engineered by imperial desire. Whiteness isn’t race here—it’s an exit sign.

Việt and Nam isn’t merely slow cinema. It’s slow death, slow love, slow violence. It breathes through silence, bleeds through the frame. Queer desire here isn’t sparkly—it’s buried, repressed, unyielding. Trương Minh Quý queers time, queers labor, queers even nationhood itself. There’s no monologue, no climax. There’s a look. A gasp. A pause that lasts long enough to become revolution.

This minimalist cinema is political refusal incarnate. It spits in the face of trauma-porn aesthetics and the Western demand for digestible queer narratives. There is no “closure” here. There is no cheap redemption. Just bodies, memory, and coal dust. Rey Chow warned against romanticizing the native queer subject. Trinh T. Minh-ha taught us to look through, not at. Quý takes that challenge and buries it in mud. The underground here isn’t setting—it’s metaphor, politics, structure, and scream. The queer body isn’t adorned—it’s laboring. Quiet. Exploited. Gorgeous.

Forget visibility. Việt and Nam makes you earn desire. It doesn’t seduce—it haunts. It chews through time, devours light, and crawls under your skin like soot you can’t scrub out.

If How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies still wants to parade around as cinema with its fake-ass, polished latex dildo grief-porn—another export of Thai soft power wrapped in tissue paper nationalism?

It can choke on its own festival buzz, gag on its sentimentalism, and die fabulously offscreen.

Because Việt and Nam doesn’t want your love.
It wants your surrender.