Category: Film and Television

In the past, Hollywood studios have generally used Thailand as a stand-in for Vietnam on the back of a more well developed film industry in Thailand as well as complicated procedures for getting approval to film in Vietnam. Most recently, producers of the Netflix series The Sympathiser, who had intended to film in Vietnam, could not get approval to do so on the back of censorship issues…

This comes just days after it was reported that the locally produced film Viet and Nam, which is headed for the Cannes Film Festival, was banned from distribution by the Department of Cinema because of its ‘gloomy’ depiction of Vietnam.

A Vietnamese film headed for Cannes has been denied a distribution licence by Vietnam’s Ministry of Communications on the grounds that it shows ‘a gloomy, deadlocked, and negative view’ of Vietnam, according to Screen Daily. This is another blow to Vietnam’s creative industries which are widely seen as underdeveloped, yet

The Prime Minister of Vietnam, Pham Minh Chinh, told a conference last week it was ‘gut-wrenching seeing foreign films on TV every time I turn it on’, VN Express is reporting. The PM said 70 percent of films on TV and at the movies are foreign (no primary source cited);