festivals to date

Berlinale Berlin International Film Festival, Berlin, Germany, 2011

Vietnamese International Film Festival, 2011, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2011

San Francisco Diasporic Vietnamese Film Festival, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2011

Yxine Film Fest, http://www.yxineff.com, 2011

Asian Film Festival Berlin, Germany, 2011

Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, Canada, 2011

Festivals - Berlinale (Berlin, Germany)

To brighten up this dismal Berlin winter, Sunday Menu has been invited to the 61st Berlinale International Film Festival 2011!

Screening is on Thursday, 17 February at 22h in the rubric Culinary Cinema. Tickets go on sale Monday, 7 February!

for more see sundaymenu_berlinale

Sunday Menu - Trailer

Here is the more official trailer to Sunday Menu, featuring the music of Tri Minh, a Vietnamese electronic music artist based in Hanoi.
The music also serves as Mi's leitmotif at the beginning of the actual film...

Sunday Menu - Unofficial Teaser

Here is a short unofficial teaser for Sunday Menu. It is accompanied by a song by Styrofoam from the compilation Blue Skied An' Clear (a tribute to Slowdive) (Morr Music, 2002) that I fell in love with. The song "Altogether" is a remix of a song by Slowdive that was released in 1994 on their album Souvlaki (Creation Records). It was written by Neil Halstead, who went on to form Mojave 3 with Rachel Goswell who was also a Slowdive member...Styrofoam is Arne van Petegem (BL), who creates and performs under that name and is with the Berlin music label Morr Music.

I love the melancholy of the Slowdive original, it feels like dreaming in slow motion. I fell in love with the Styrofoam remix for my film because it adds a child-like lightness, but somehow a bit of irony; it leaves room to read between the lines - and the various aspects of the liminal is what this film is about...

...I am awaiting permission regarding use of this song and other songs I'd like to include in the film, so this may change to another song at some point. However I did feel it was time to put this up for the cast and crew that has been waiting so long, as well as information for other interested and potential supporters...

UPDATE: Ultimately, it would have been too complicated and costly to acquire the rights to this song. So we went with the song by Tri Minh that double's as Mi's leitmotif in the film. See the official trailer for more!

Music

The choice and use of music has been very important for me in the making of this film. The music sets and supports the mood where the subjects are silent.

Many thanks to the several international composers, performers and labels/ publishers who kindly supported this project with their music!

Excerpts from the songs below were used (in chronological order). Click on the highlighted artist/ label names for their respective myspace page and/or website!


"Ai Oi 2" by Tri Minh (Hanoi, VN)
I love this song as the opening theme of the film. Simultaneously modern and traditional, this clearly Asian motif sets a mood that is gentle and curiously persistent.


"Cutlery Flavors", by Isan, album "Lucky Cat" (Morr Music)
A passage from this song underlies a moment of loaded silence between the mother and protagonist/ daughter. The mood is melancholic, but the song's spacey embellishments/ oscillations create room for hopeful dreaming, movement...


"Inch Inch (Healamonster & Tarsier Remix), by Neotropic aka Riz Maslen (Squid's Eye Records/ Council Folk Recordings)
A part of this song accompanies a short moped ride montage, where the protagonist has made a move of independence and 'escaped' her everyday restaurant job to discover a Vietnamese center outside of the city. Driven by the steady and playful beat, it's a brief moment of ambivalent calm in the film with a few glimpses of Berlin, from a subjective point of view.


"Mr Pott", by Ferri Borbás & Liesl Nguyen.
The sound underlying a montage sequence between mother and daughter. The passing of time, loneliness and estrangement. The song is cyclical like their relationship, yet bears a sense of hope, as we move from interior to exterior...


"My Tam in Experimental Form" by Tri Minh (Hanoi, VN)
This is a great track for a scene where Mi visits the Vietnamese market Dong Xuan Center for the first time. Her impressions melt into a dream...


"Bamboo Computer" by VuNhatTan (Hanoi, VN)
...introduces a surreal scene between Mi and a frog. A special moment that suggests another dimension. The sound is reduced, mysterious and powerful.


Karaoke scene: this is actually a documentary scene. Here, the actor Huy Van Martin Nguyen sings his favorite karaoke song in a restaurant in Dong Xuan Center. This merges into an acted scene where he as Thai, speaks with Mi.
A favorite of the actor, the song "Tiễn biệt" is by composer Thanh Tùng. The karaoke version of the song was performed by Quốc Đại for a karaoke production by Kim Lơi Studio in HCMC, VN.


"She's Sleeping" by Thailan (lyrics) & DJ Werd (beats/ production)/ Long Lost Relative
I fell in love with this song when Thailan and DJ Werd aka Drew Pace performed it as part of their collaborative project Long Lost Relative in Berlin a few years ago. The memory of it returned to me when I was thinking about music for the end scene and credits. The mood and the lyrics fit so well to that of the film, kind of sums it up.

Sunday Menu - An Explanation

The film Sunday Menu is about a teenage girl confronting generational and cross-cultural conflicts through the ritualistic power of food in the suburbs of Berlin, Germany. Its quiet, elliptical pacing gives us a glimpse into the emotional world of the protagonist, Mi. She shares her world with her homesick Grandmother "Bà", Mi's mother "Hanh" who struggles with her unsuccessful restaurant, and cousin "Thai", who seems to successfully straddle German and Vietnamese worlds.

Visual emphasis in the film on close-ups, body language, angles, colors and sound sensually convey Mi’s inner world. Quiet, long shots of the sprawling, gray landscape of the Berlin suburbs populated with anonymous social housing highrises underline the feelings of alienation experienced in different ways by all four characters in the film. At the same time, the exterior expanse is in contrast to the characters’ interior (and inner) confines - and thus harbors the potential for a way out. Montage sequences, surreal encounters and silent moments convey the characters' emotional atmospheres and relationships. Minimal and stilted dialogue on everyday events reflects the limitations and ambivalence of cultural translation and what is left unsaid. Meanwhile, the soundscape creates a further level of atmospheric hybridity. A short sequence of archival photographs documenting the Vietnamese presence in Berlin is reminder of the sociopolitical context that implicitly affects the protagonists’ private sphere. Mi’s exploration of a real Vietnamese market in Berlin is an impressionistic link to one aspect of the actual situation in Germany.


The film is loosely inspired by the short story "Sunday Menu" (Thực đơn chủ nhật) by Vietnamese writer Pham Thi Hoai, who resides in Berlin.

Director's Motivation

I have worked with this subject matter for a number of years in various forms and genres: through independent and academic research, in my work with Vietnamese-German children and youth, and through my own art work.
As a half-Vietnamese American, born and raised in the US and living in Berlin as the mother to a bicultural daughter of my own, my personal experiences of course flavor my relationship to the situation of Vietnamese in Berlin and elsewhere and immigration in general.

The stories of the Vietnamese author Pham Thi Hoai, one of contemporary Vietnam’s most influential writers and who lives in Berlin, have accompanied me since I first read her book Sunday Menu over 10 years ago in German translation. Her portrayals of individuals and relationships caught within greater social mechanisms appeal to me with their irony and intimacy. Sadly, her writings have been banned in Vietnam on and off since her first novel The Crystal Messenger was published in 1988.

The idea to adapt a few of her short stories to film in a way that takes them out of Vietnam while keeping them within a greater Vietnamese context - filtered through the individual experiences of myself and the cast (and then the crew) - is a very personal project for me that also aspires to shed new light on a diverse culture which is still quite underrepresented in the non-Vietnamese media.

Admittedly, "adaptation" is used here very loosely. Better would be to say that Pham's stories are the inspiration for Sunday Menu and hopefully 2 or 3 additional short films to be realized in Warsaw, Paris, and Hanoi...

Stories of Kieu - The Project

Stories of Kieu is the working title for a short-film series about Vietnamese in the diaspora by Alisa Lieu Anh Kotmair, loosely inspired by the short stories of Pham Thi Hoai.

Each film is set in a different Vietnamese community, adapted from the original stories, to reflect the cultural and geographical specifics of each city. The three cities and countries selected in Europe are home to the largest Vietnamese populations in the European Union: Paris, France, Berlin, Germany and Warsaw, Poland.

The dialogue of each film is in Vietnamese as well as another language depending on the city. With minimal characters and locations, a unique cinematic style, and an elliptical narrative structure, each film is a kind of kammerspiel about love, loss, and identity.

A fourth short film realized in Hanoi, Vietnam would ideally serve as a reflexive arc to contextualize the three European films as part of an artistic endeavor by the director...

Sunday Menu Crew

(HFF/ Academy for Film & Television "Konrad Wolf"):

• Writer/director/editor: Alisa Lieu Anh Kotmair (aka Liesl Nguyen)
• Director of Photography: Marco Armborst
• Sound Recording & Design: Gregor Bonse
• Production Manager: Julia Terrey
• Production Assistant: Laura Höfer
• Dramaturgical Support: Alexandra Yu
  
• Executive Producer: Holger Lochau - Academy for Film and Television "Konrad Wolf"
• HFF Advisors: Dietmar Kraus, Gerhard Schumm, Annette Friedmann 
  

ADDITIONAL NON-HFF CREW WITHOUT WHOM THIS FILM WOULD BARELY HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE, in alphabetical order:

• Christopher Becker (Grip)
• Jonas Broxtermann (Unit Manager)
• Frank Brückner (Acting Coach)
• Veronika Doroscheva (Continuity)
• Raphael Grisey (Set Assistance)
• Gillian Holt (Gaffer/Grip)
• Franziska Markurt (Hair & Make-up)
• Mara Maroske (Set & Props)
• Normen Zok (Runner/ Best Boy)
  

MANY THANKS TO:

• Kurt Mundahl for his set photographs
• Tinh for his logistical assistance and location scouting
• Minh for the Bistro location
• Petra and Kieu for their support and translation assistance
• ...and all others who have provided their support and got missed on this list...you'll be included in the official credits on the film if I can manage it!