SAIGON EXPERIMENTAL film festival

Saigon Experimental Film Festival is a growing initiative dedicated to imaginative and non-traditional video works in a country where these have limited visibility and creative expression must abide by governmental "standards".

The rhetoric is the following: with a lack of new media taught in art school, no cinémathèques in the country, and limited diversity in mainstream cinemas, the realm of moving image is limited and restrained with little visibility for practitioners that work outside the norm. Concurrently, audiences possess few opportunities to experience new cinematic visions, always dependent on alternative cafés, spaces, and galleries - which are few - to provide this missing content. This also means fewer opportunities for emerging Vietnamese artists or filmmakers to witness and explore what is being made elsewhere and inform their own work. The shared love for this medium paired with a clear need for such events is what launched this initiative.

Although humble in scale, this event is an ode to creative expression and freedom to attend such events. If such creative content does not pass the censorship test allowed for cinema showcases in Vietnam, experimental filmmaking or video art is also rarely approved by censorship committees as punctual events or as artwork displayed in a gallery. Their initiative aims to fill this gap of unseen work in the Vietnamese moving image landscape.