Hair, Paper, Water… (Tóc, Giáy Và Nuóc, 2025) ‘Locarno’ Movie Review: Wondrously Porous Distillation of Language-Memory

There’s a real delight, a warm, immediately involving pull certain special, personally inflected films thrust. Nicolas Graux and Trương Minh Quý’s latest collaboration, “Hair, Paper, Water…” (Original title: Tóc, Giáy Và Nuóc, 2025) belongs to this tiny league, cutting through layers of memory and wedging up a series of gossamer-like moments that feel plucked from the most exquisite ether of existence. “In a cave, I was born…”, a woman’s voice opens the film, which serrates a lacework of images and sounds, each realised and pulsing with grace and economy. Through mnemonic associations between words and visual impressions, the elderly Mrs. Hậu seeks to diffuse her native Rục language to a brood of children and grandchildren. As she talks, mostly unaccompanied by a response, her familiar world richly opens up for us. She begins with pinning ties with animals and insects, the shots dutifully interspersed.

At times, there’s a shock, like a colony of bats darting past with frenzy and fury in the darkness. Then, the movement abates to make us encounter something more minute, like fireflies. She relates scraps of anecdotes and memories from her first time in Saigon, and being overwhelmed and disoriented by the rushing crowd. Coming from rural quietude, the noise and excess, the high rises loom as too constricting. Immediately, she yearns for the nurturing expanse of her village, the open, airy spaces. Even the cave seems more infinitely encompassing. It’s the site she keeps returning to–across the roomy span of memories, dreams, and thoughts she wishes to emboss in the young.

Hair, Paper, Water… (2025) — A still from “Hair, Paper, Water…” (2025)

She goes to Saigon to look after her granddaughter, who has given birth. Some of the film delves into the act of caregiving, suffused with a clutch of various leaves. She talks about different kinds of plants; close-ups captured on 16mm film, ringed by vivid punctuation, sway through the loving meticulousness of the rituals. Each plant, woven irrevocably with her community and its traditions, has something useful, filled with healing, regenerative capacity. Permeated with verdures, “Hair, Paper, Water…” exudes tactility.

Full of sensory reverberations, it is grounded in daily rhythms even as it proceeds somewhere sublime. Graux’s frames and the sound design envelop completely. We’re whisked into the heart of a village, nature a keenly abiding presence. But the film doesn’t arrest us in one location alone. It unspools as a tapestry, stitching together moments and episodes from Hậu’s everyday life. She strikes as the last of her kind, holding out, steadfast and hopeful. Living is hard, demanding for her, as it often has been. There have been numerous occasions when she sold off clumps of her long hair to fend for daily necessities, somehow scraping by.

The film desists from wading too deep into her internal life. The emphasis is on a weave of sights and sounds, an ecology and intimate language, both being quickly razed over in oblivion, neglect, and damaging superimposition. How do we hold onto our ancestral gifts–the markers of where we have come from? Erasing a language signals destroying an entire people’s cultural memory, a sacred sense of private ritual. It’s like someone taking a machete and hacking away at our most precious foundations.

The singular focus of “Hair, Paper, Water…” on one endangered language implicitly sweeps in its midst similar fates of countless other dialects and tribes. Amidst fast collapse, reinstating our grip becomes as vital and radical an act as can ever be–a gesture of active resistance. But this isn’t an incensed film, the kind that’s desperate and railing to dole out its political overtures. Rather, the textured lyricism it threads throbs with a life-force which revitalises in itself. We grow attuned to how sound travels through a cave’s dark abscesses, steam rising off a freshly prepared meal. What equally resonates is a sense of time, passing by, and subtly insisting we pay attention.

There are the acacia harvests and flooding. Insect buzz fills the air. Kids play. A woman reassures her grandchild that he can fall back on her, amidst strained relations between parents. But he must do well to move out. Caught somewhere deep within her appeal is he should also clasp onto the language she has whispered across. A deeply immersive work, both visually and aurally absorbing, “Hair, Paper, Water…” is a stirring portrait of a woman rallying for her dying language in her own tender way. The intimate and political fuse lightly in this work, whose every breath can be felt intensely.