A Scene By The Sea
2022 · 25m · Vietnam
Directed by Quản Phương Thanh
Tones: contemplative, tense
Cuc, a retired nurse, along with her husband and children go to a small town by the sea to visit their future family-in-law, as her daughter is getting married. The joyful journey quickly becomes tense when the family-in-law wants them to pay for the wedding because their daughter is 4 months pregnant.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a family drama about waiting by the sea—exactly the kind of restraint-over-rupture premise that would bore me senseless, except Thanh somehow makes tension out of nothing, which is either genius or a trick I'm still figuring out.
A meditation on familial silence shot with the formal patience of a landscape painter; the film situates itself in a lineage of contemplative Asian cinema while maintaining its own rigorous, almost austere visual grammar.
Thanh's decision to let the sea itself become the emotional arbiter—neither scored nor forced, just present—transforms what could've been static family drama into something that breathes, and that single compositional choice holds the whole film aloft.