EXCLUSIVE: Venice Critics’ Week title Don’t Cry Butterfly has been boarded by CJ CGV Vietnam for distribution in Vietnam.
Affiliated with Korea’s CJ Group, CJ CGV Vietnam also distributed the Vietnamese-language Camera d’Or winner Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell last year.
Don’t Cry Butterfly follows a 45-year old housewife, Tam, who learns through live TV that her husband is having an affair. Turning to mystical means, she then attempts to voodoo her husband back into love.
The debut feature by Duong Dieu Linh will have its world premiere at the Venice Critics’ Week on September 3 before arriving at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10.
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Don’t Cry Butterfly is a Vietnam-Singapore-Indonesia-Philippines co-production. Korea’s Barunson E&A picked up world sales rights to the title ahead of the Cannes market this year.
“The idea for this feature started 10 years ago, when I came back to Vietnam to make my first short film,” Duong told Deadline. “It was a short film about a mother and daughter, with the daughter having a relationship with a married man. The mother goes to a voodoo master who tries to perform a ‘cutting destiny’ ritual for the relationship. It was a short experimental film.”
Duong highlighted the women in her life — her mother, aunties and cousins — for sparking her interest in making films about women, especially middle-aged women.
“Growing up, I watched a lot of Vietnamese films and many showed gentle and devoting women taking care of the family, but they always ended up getting abused, cheated on or just not treated very nicely by men,” Duong said. “When I was making these short films, I was trying to find an answer for why women have to suffer so much.”
Duong said that she is particularly inspired by the visual styles in Asian extreme cinema, pointing to the films of Japanese directors Shinya Tsukamoto, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sion Sono, as well as Korean auteurs Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk. She is also inspired by body horror works from Andrzej Żuławski, David Cronenberg and John Carpenter.
Most of Duong’s short films — including Don’t Cry Butterfly — usually feature non-trained or first-time actors. The cast of Don’t Cry Butterfly includes Le Tu Oanh, Nguyen Nam Linh, Le Vu Long and Bui Thac Phong.
Duong said: “I like to cast people who have a certain connection with the characters I write. After I talk to them, we read through the script and dialogue together. We then talk a lot about the characters — who they are, what their daily life is like and how they have grown up. With one of my actors, he even ended up writing and keeping up a diary as the character during production.”
The film is produced by Tan Si En (Momo Film Co), Wilfredo C. Manalang (FUSEE), Nguyen Mai Ka (Kalei Films) and Yulia Evina Bhara (KawanKawan Media).
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