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He first landed on Mars in early 2045.
He only carried with him a few things from home
as people told him he wouldn’t need much there.
For here everything was new and completely different.
A whole new life.
Among his stuff there were one camera and one small recorder
as he planned to make film during his free time here
(actually, on Mars that meant most of the time).
A documentary about life on Mars for example.
One day he did a recording test of the sounds around where he lived.
And this was the result:
For a fleeting moment it reminded him of the sound of wind
rifting through a roof somewhere on Earth.
(Speaking in the Ruc language) Back then, I was born here.
On that day my father went hunting in the forest, my pregnant mother was at home with my three sisters.
After she gave birth to me, she put me on this rock.
She didn’t place me on the ground, she was afraid the ants would eat me.
My father came back and asked for mother’s whereabouts.
My sisters told him that mother had given birth.
He asked "Boy or Girl?". They answered, "Girl".
My mother asked my sisters to take the dried tree barks to wrap me up.
We lied here for 3 nights, then went over there for 10 days.
After 10 days, we moved out there.
My sisters and my father slept over there. My mother and I slept here.
And the fence was all around to protect us from tigers entering to capture the children.
My mother stayed here for one month, then moved up over there.
Staying there for one more month.
Then my mother and my father went to find food in the forest.
Only I and my sisters stayed at home. We just sit on the rock over there...
...until I learnt to crawl
Crawling around the cave.
Nowhere else to go.
All the time we just sat inside this cave.
When I was 2 years old, my family left for another cave to find food.
(Speaking in H'mong) Try this one mom, it tastes really good!
Try this.
I’ll have the chicken neck then.
Hello, I hear you son.
I’m writing a script, there is this detail…
...Long ago when...
Dad, can you hear me clearly?
I’m listening.
Back then, when we were building the house...
Do you remember?
- Building our family's house? - Yes.
During that time, were we living in grandfather’s house?
Ah, no!
Our old house was a wooden house.
While building the new house, we built it gradually.
Before staying at grandfather’s house, building was already in progress.
There were times when we were staying at grandfather's house.
Once the house was finished we moved back home.
How long did it take to build the house?
That period was very difficult.
The house took 5 months to build.
Because there were not enough workers.
Where are you now dad?
I'm at home.
Hello?
"After many hours searching in the deep forests
yesterday afternoon the police from Tây Trà district, Quảng Ngãi province
have brought the father and the son, both the Kor ethnicity, back to the village."
"It was very difficult for the militia force and the villagers to approach the father and his son."
"Because every time they saw the people, they run away."
"When being approached, the father and the son were still wearing the loincloths made of tree barks."
"The son is still healthy,
but the father needed to be carried to the village by the local force."
"Knowing the event and with the command from the party committee,
the volunteers, the local militia force, and the police
went to catch them to bring them back here."
Don’t run over there or the ghost will catch you.
Come here.
Come.
Come to mama.
Baby!
What is it?
Time to go home.
Let me carry you, I’ll give you some sweets.
Hurry or I’ll catch you.
How old are you this year?
(Speaking in the Kor language)
He said he came down here over 4 years.
His age is 48 or 49. He can’t remember clearly.
How many years did you live with your father in the forest?
Over 40 years. 41.42.
"According to the villagers,
over 40 years ago when the country was still in the war, his house was bombed."
"Many of his family members died."
"Under this terrible shock, he carried his infant son and run away."
"Few days ago when some villagers were farming in the forest, they saw the father and the son."
"So they informed the local authority of the news."
"Due to their isolated life, they only can babble some words in the Kor language."
"How could they survive in such a severe environment of the deep forests for more than 40 years?"
"That's the question many people asked."
Back then, in the forest most of the time he just ate, then slept.
Can you point your finger to your old home?
Growing up, I lived in a cave. I don’t know since when we started to live in caves.
Apparently from our ancestors' time, we were already living in caves.
When hiding from the Americans, we creeped into any caves near and far.
But with the habitable caves...
with many people living in them...
we had to find caves far from them, otherwise there wasn't enough meat to eat.
Each person covered a mountain and a forest.
In May and June, when there are many honey bees
I along with the children, or my aunts and uncles, visit our cave
for one or two nights.
Then go back to the village.
The cave I stayed in was covered up all around like a beautiful roof.
A place for the fire.
Inside there are rocks for lying down.
A cave is like a normal house.
He said in the forest they built their house on a tree.
There were four pillars piercing through the tree.
Several columns were erected.
Then the roof was made.
It was their tree house.
How high was the tree?
From the ground up, if measured in meters, it is about 6 or 7m.
Plus the roof makes it 8, 9m.
(Speaking in the Ruc language) The soup’s too salty.
Yes, too salty.
Now where to get water after meal then?
It's too spicy.
Will it rain tonight?
So tomorrow there will be water to drink.
That day my father hunted a monkey.
My father grilled it.
My sisters and I took the sticks to scratch the monkey's hair for it to burn completely.
My father chopped it into pieces and then cooked it.
The whole family was eating.
A group of soldiers came.
I and my sisters all ran away and hid behind the rocks.
My father called, "Come out to eat, then go to the village with them."
I didn't want to.
They gave candies for us to stop crying.
But we didn't dare to take them.
They asked my parents to call us out to make the acquaintance.
But us sisters still didn't dare.
My parents gave us the candies.
We tried them and found them very sweet.
We asked our parents, "What are these thing, so tasty?"
Then the soldiers said, "Come, we still have a lot of candies for you."
Since then, we knew how candies tasted like.
I regretted the monkey meat. We had to throw it away.
I cried all the way walking to the village.
The Ruc people were learning how to cultivate rice paddies.
From a far distance behind them it was the barracks of Border Defence Force.
A soldier told him,
"Teaching the Ruc people how to grow rice is helping them to evolve 1000 years faster."
So displacing them from their caves
and then relocating them into the identical yellow-brick houses
was also helping them to evolve 1000 years faster?
What was your food in the cave?
Eat “giúc”.
Eat “mài” yams...
Eat the “cà bạc” tree.
Eat the “ruồi” tree.
Eat crabs.
Eat frogs down the streams.
Eat birds.
Monkeys and boars.
Make traps for animals.
Wild pennywort tastes real nice with garlic!
I’ll bring home a bunch of these.
What kind of vegetable got them all hospitalized when vising the cave?
- Who? - Mrs. Tới!
Must be the wrong thing she ate, not the wild veggies!
So is it from pesticides then?
But who in the world sprays that in the forest?
That day she picked up some veggies, and cooked them with pork for the whole family.
The whole family got hospitalized.
But we eat these wild plants all the time!
- Maybe they got poisoned by the pork? - The pork was contaminated.
When I die
please make me a tomb house
where my body can rot
and my soul can have a shelter
like the souls of Jrai people in their tomb houses.
But as a part of the majority of Kinh people,
will I be admitted to a tomb house of the Montagnards?
In the realm of the dead
will it still matter
the languages and the colors of skins?
Years ago he asked a Jrai elder about death.
“What would we do if somebody dies?"
"We would cut down trees to make coffins."
"In our village a coffin could contain 3, 4, 5, 6 or even 10 people."
"If there are not enough coffins, then the bodies would be put inside only one coffin,
one body after another like meat stuffed into a pot."
"Then we bury them."
"We worship once at the end of every month."
"Besides, we go to visit and feed them every day
on mornings, noons, or afternoons that would depend on our available time."
"This could last for 2, 3 or even 10 years. That totally depends on us."
When we no longer feel sorrowful and miss the dead, then we can quit visiting them.”
(Speaking in Jrai) Just the day before, left you to your work, but work you did not.
Why did you have to end your life, just out of jail, yet you drank the poison and passed away
and broke your parents’ heart with grief.
For the Montagnards life was a continuous train of images
like in a film roll.
It was said that
an aggrieved mother at the death of her son
when she saw his images projected on the screen, she broke into tears.
As she thought he was still alive.
She asked her son back to her.
Everything visible for the Montagnards was called ‘Rup’,
the body.
The invisible was ‘Soan’,
the spirit.
Rup and Soan
Life and Death
Day and Night
Positive and Negative
A tomb house was like the negative house for the living.
A spirit had no size.
A tiny space in a tomb house
was where the dead continue living through different images.
In Vietnamese, his mother tongue,
'Negative' also meant 'the realm of the death'.
'Positive' was 'the world of the living'.
A person who came from the negative realm
was a resurrected soul.
Negative Images
Images of Death
Positive Images
Images of Life
Dad,
I’m calling you from Ha Giang, the far north of Vietnam,
1600 km away from home.
I’m out here searching for characters for my upcoming film.
View of the streets and buildings are more or less the same as our hometown.
Except for H’Mong’s houses hanging over the high mountain slopes.
Those houses are all made of mud taken from the mountains themselves.
The floors are also solid earth.
The people living inside, like the deceased,
are all protected by earth.
The bare feet walking on the earthen floor
will know the rain from the dampness
and the summer from the warmth in the ground.
On the bus someone was listening to “Nostalgia” sung by Thái Thanh.
Do you listen to her songs?
When I’m at home all you put on play is Abba.
Thái Thanh is a much-renowned singer in the South Vietnam
before the war ends in 1975.
'Nostalgia' means to return home with pain.
Have you known that the new government banned Thái Thanh from singing after 1975?
Having arrived in America in 1985,
at her very first performance after more than 10 years of silence
she sang this song.
In the original version, the song ends with
"home"
But here she bursted into singing:
"far away from home"
She broke into tears at the end of the song.
Has she perhaps realized at that very moment
she was a homeless in that foreign land?
His childhood house was just off the main road.
It was a slim three-story house with the typical urban architecture of Vietnam.
He and his brothers all slept on the 3rd floor.
The trucks that ran through the nights would make the floor
and the glass windows vibrate.
Along with these were the honkings that would pierce the ears like needles.
They were disturbances to a child’s dreams.
But at this moment
on Mars...
he missed the traffic noises.
They became rhythms reminiscent of lost dreams.
His nights on Mars passed in silence.
So silent that he felt heavy.
At 3 or 4 pm...
the sunlight from the west would be shining down from the window at the top of the stairs.
Every time he looked up, he saw countless specks of dust floating in the light.
The small particles of dust were like stars on a galaxy.
This galaxy of memory dust
would vanish with just a light wind.
One day the young Montagnards decided to cross the border into Cambodia.
They crossed the forest with just small backpacks and a handful of clothes,
but the most crucial things
were always guarded by their hands:
their passports.
Trapped in the arid forests
they were waiting for the day they could arrive a third country.
That new land might lie somewhere over the sea.
Somewhere over the rainbow.
The boats of the past and present have all sunk to the bottom of the ocean.
Wandering souls adrifted in the endless ocean.
None would build tomb houses for these Montagnards.
None would come to pray and give them food every day.
They were far away from the houses of the dead of their ancestors.
Would there be an invisible island amidst ocean
where the souls could come to rest?
Those people, anonymous in life,
and unknown in death.
O mother! Fled through the forest, leaving us behind, o mother!
Remember us still, mother! Our little brother working in the yard, o mother!
Up our house’s terrace, o mother! with your utensils and pots and pans, o mother!
Down tending your paddy field, o mother! feed the shrimps and fishes in your stead, mother!
Mother! Have your time with us brought no joy, now things unsaid and kind words unspoken, mother!
Yet so far from us you have gone, o mother!
He found the archival footage of "the Village Resettlement Program"
recorded by American soldiers in 1967
in Quang Ngai, also homeland of "the jungle man".
The soldiers came here not only with guns but also with cameras.
The filmmaker soldiers
were recording people moving from their home to the resettled houses
on the pretext of their own safety.
Those abandoned houses had to be burnt
to prevent the Communists from using them.
But was it not that good excuses were always used
to make people homeless?
And 50 years later
he also came to this place with a camera.
"For what?"
He wondered.
To take away other people’s stories?
To intrude their private spaces
and strip them the right for anonymity?
He always felt the tension every time pointing the camera at them, saying:
"Shoot!"
Then he picked a title for the film to stamp his ownership over these images and stories.
But how could he own what inherently never belonged to him?
Who was he to speak on the people's behalf?
The camera had rolled but he and the cinematographer weren’t aware of that.
When seeing this during editing
he recalled a similar scene from a Agnes Varda's film.
In that scene she too forgot turning off the camera as walking.
She put it romantically as:
"The Dance of The Lens Cap"
Not as romantic as she was,
seeing this he only thought about the burnt feet of film.
The negative film had died
so that the death of film could be visible.
The movements akin to the breathless breathes of film on its last moment.
His tree house is no longer there, They burnt it all.
All burnt. Only the coal left.
My father went hunting and my mother stayed at home.
I followed my mother to find crabs in the small streams...
then we went to cut down the big trees and brought them home to eat.
It’s not like the children today that go to school two times a day.
There are no schools in the forest.
I came down to the village at age 11, then went to school at age 13.
I couldn’t read the alphabet. Didn't understand anything my teacher taught.
At age 14 I could babble and pronounce words like O, A.
My teachers gave me books, held my hands to teach me how to write.
My teachers gave me clothes to wear.
I got along with friends. And slowly I wasn't afraid anymore.
In the past, at this rock here is where us four sisters would play everyday.
Everyday once eating is done, we would get together to climb up the rock and slide down.
Climb up and slide down.
Sit here and holler at each other to go out and play...
“Come here and play! When dad comes home, there’ll be monkey meat to eat!"
We quarreled then fell and the little ones cried.
Keep going up and down like this.
The other cave had no rocks like this one to play with anymore.
We were playing like this and all yelled, "It's so good!"
My big sister would say, "You’re older, don’t make her cry.
"Sisters play together in harmony. Do not scuffle with each other."
You have grey hair now.
My hair used to be really long then, down to my feet.
My mother-in-law’s hair was also long just like yours.
We all had really long hair back then.
My sister and brother have long hair but not me.
I and another sister have curly hair.
It is itchy!
Sweaty...
...louses.
Dad,
I’m calling you from Mars
54,6 million kilometers away from home.
The emptiness found in nature here,
its endless unfolding of red deserts
interspersed by intermittent memories.
Those memories that stopped before the beginning of the photographs.
How old was I then?
Maybe 4 or 5 years old.
There were the photographs of me standing next to a pond in a pagoda during Lunar New Year.
I asked myself about
what had happened before a 4-year old me?
Not a single photograph for that period.
I can't recall a single thing during that period.
Yet strangely
she could recall all happenings when she was just 2 years old,
even prior to that.
Even the stone slab where her mother gave birth to her.
Multiple times I asked her if she were talking about her own, not someone else’s stories.
Perhaps a misunderstanding due to linguistic differences?
Her Ruc’s language is spoken only, not written.
Only around 500 people use it.
The Ruc people was found out in early 1950s.
A vulnerable community.
Their language is on the verge of disappearing at any moment.
(Speaking Vietnamese)
Speak Ruc please.
She confirmed that it was herself she was talking about.
Perhaps the difference is not about their or our language,
but the way of preserving memories between us and them Ruc people.
Our memories depend too much on images:
Photography.
As for them,
their memories are stories filled with imagination.
That day, my parents went far away to find food, so they couldn’t come home.
At home there were only us four sisters.
All four sisters ate "mài" yams and then went to sleep.
My third sister asked "Do our parents come home?"
My oldest sister told us not to worry about that, we should just go to sleep.
Then we all lied on the dirt ground, trying to sleep.
We hadn’t slept long when we heard a ghost moving around us.
We weren’t sure if it was a ghost or not but it was very frightening.
We all cried and hugged each other tightly.
Then my oldest sister told all of us to stop crying.
She reminded us that our parents said if we were home alone and heard anything unusual,
we should burn the firewood to light up the place.
Even the snakes or the tigers who saw and sniffed the fire wouldn’t even dare to enter.
My oldest sister took all of the firewood and burned them up brightly.
Then us three sisters slept well while she waited for our parents to return.
The house is different from the cave.
Sitting in the cave, the air is different.
It is cold and freezing.
At the house, it is airier.
In the cave, it is pitch dark with no electric lights.
Mosquitoes everywhere.
No blankets.
But you and everyone sometimes visit the caves. Why?
I remember. I miss the place where I lived.
If I can still walk, then I try to visit it again.
When I can’t go anymore, then so be it.
There are old people who visited their caves, once they returned the village, they died.
Because of forestsickness.
Jade Rabbit
There was a 6 or 7-meter-tall tree.
On the tree, there was a small house where he and his father lived.
A fire burned everything to the ground.
This is the pomelo tree that he and his father planted.
His father died in 2017, 4 years after he had been brought out of the forest.
"Ghosts, don't call us, don't come close to us, don't love us anymore. From now on, we will not bring you food and water anymore.
If you want to eat meat, please ask the God of the Moon. From now on, it has ended, as the m'nang leaves separate from the tree."
- the prayers at the Leaving Tomb ceremony.
Are you fine at home?
Have you had any medicine yet?
Are you ill?
Feeling better?
Anyone sleeping with the baby?
Or sings him any lullaby?
His dad came back?
Why not drink your medicine yesterday?
Hello!
I remember in the past that you used to catch crickets to eat, right?
Yes, that is correct.
I went onto the farm land to catch the crickets.
I would tie 10, 15 of them onto a blade of grass and bring them home.
How did you cook them?
I washed them first,
then put them in a pan to give them a little golden color.
After that I put peanuts into the crickets’ belly.
Then I fried them again with pig fat.
Only pig fat because there was no cooking oil in the past.
I fried until the crickets were swollen up.
It was very delicious.
I remember I used to hide inside the wardrobe
to eat an ice cream or an apple.
The rays of light went inside through the small holes on the door.
I heard my parents calling me,
Through the holes I saw them walking by trying to find me.
But I didn’t reply.
After a while I silently sneaked out
and appeared in front of my parents.
They had no idea where I had been.
They didn't know that
I had been in my cave.
Without photographed images
what would become my memories?
All the males, females and children
one day decided to leave their caves.
They were curious about what lay beyond the jungle.
With bare feet they crossed the jungle.
The freezing nights and jungle rains didn’t slow them down.
Large beasts were hunted to relieve their hungers,
and leftover meats were preserved for long days to come.
Finally,
the males, females and children took their first steps outside the jungle.
The vast plains met their eyes,
and the horizon lay at the end of earth.
Sea.
One person after another
and finally all turned around, looked at where they had left.
They saw the distant lofty mountain ranges shrouded in clouds.
They knew those mountains had been their home.
Some cried
but they would never return.
The plains were to be their new home.
But their hands, still warm with the memories from their cave home,
made the roofs with shape like the mountain top,
so they could still return to their childhood home in their daydreams.
Coming back from the cave, last night while sleeping here, I couldn’t sleep well.
It wasn’t until four in the morning that I was able to sleep.
Slept at 4 A.M.
I slept better in the cave.
More comfortably.
Here it is noisy. I couldn't sleep.
I keep thinking
in the past there were a lot of food in the cave.
Such as "giuc', monkey meat, so on.
Now when I return, I do not have those anymore.
I feel uncomfortable and discontent.
I keep remembering.
"Cave" in our native Ruc language is "Kop".
It means "Living in the cave".
He decided not to complete the film.
He put the camera back in the storeroom.
Here on Mars nobody wanted to watch film anymore.
It was a new life here.
Cinema had become the joy of the past.
A 54.6 million-kilometer past back in the home on Earth.
"Home"
"Far away from home."
"Just after a few weeks in space, we had tremendous difficulties recollecting...
the smell of the grasses, the damp rains in the summer, the snow dust, the faces of our family and friends...
...All of them only reappeared in our dreams." Pyotr Klimuk, the USSR cosmonaut.