‘Hair, Paper, Water…’ Review: Preserving a Vanishing Culture, One Word at a Time

Languages, peoples, landscapes. Customs, habits, traditions. Time has a way of sweeping many of them aside—erased by conquest, “civilization,” globalization, and whatever comes next. Cinema, in its own way, works as a repository: of people, places, objects, rituals, and speech. In Hair, Paper, Water…, Vietnamese filmmaker Truong Minh Quý (Viet and Nam) and Belgian director Nicolas Graux take on a project that feels at once archival, ethnographic, and purely cinematic, by following the everyday life of an elderly woman and her grandson in a small Vietnamese village.

Shot on a Bolex 16mm. camera, with images that evoke the texture of decades-old cinema, the film immerses itself in the Quảng Bình province and in the life of Cao Thị Hậu, a member of the Rục people—a community so small that it only came into contact with the outside world in the mid-20th century. Today, its members speak Vietnamese, but struggle to preserve their original language. Through a mix of stories and small vignettes, Hair, Paper, Water… becomes, in part, a kind of language lesson: the grandmother teaching her grandson, a process the filmmakers make explicit through the use of intertitles.

That simple structure—Cao naming a word in Rục and explaining its meaning, the boy attempting to repeat and pronounce it—functions as a linguistic exercise, but more importantly as an invitation into this world. It opens a window onto its spaces, its culture, its daily rhythms. Cao’s voice carries the storytelling, while the images drift elsewhere, capturing the landscape and her precise gestures—preparing medicinal pastes, handling food, moving through her environment.

The film unfolds like a warm, gently hybrid tale—somewhere between the childlike and the experimental—centered on that intimate act of transmission we still call popular culture. Preserving language is essential here—the filmmakers mirror that impulse in their choice of film stock and in how they use it—but so is opening a path toward other ways of living, thinking, remembering. Cao speaks of her children, most of whom have left the village, including the boy’s parents, whose story carries a darker, heavier weight. And she simply goes on with her daily life.

Rather than following her in a conventional observational mode, the filmmakers weave her stories together with images that initially seem disconnected, gradually assembling a quietly evocative portrait of a way of life—and a language—on the verge of disappearing. That almost school-like exercise shared by grandmother, grandson, and filmmakers—one that may even prompt viewers to repeat the words out loud—might feel didactic at first glance. But it’s something else entirely: an elegy, an act of respect, and a tribute to a long, fragile tradition.