[Video] Filmmaker Explores the Fading Tradition of Vietnamese Funeral Singers

Trapped among Vietnam's fast-fading cultural markers is its funereal music. Passed down for generations, these slow, melancholy songs are a mainstay at Vietnamese funerals, ushering the dead comfortably into the afterlife. As the saying goes: “The living need light, the dead need music.”

Documentary filmmaker Thanh Hoang was grieving the loss of her father when she came across the story of Bay, one such funeral singer whose traditional occupation was being lost to Vietnam's rapid modernization. A villager in northern Vietnam, Bay is one of the few people carrying on this tradition of funereal music, visiting the homes of the bereaved to sing at local funerals.

“I was interested in the idea of living and death,” Hoang tells Saigoneer. “I read about the story of [Bay] in a magazine, and I was really touched...It was the time that my dad passed away, and I really wanted to learn about the process of dying and how it's related to living.”

Formerly a TV journalist, Hoang had moved to New York City and was earning an MFA in Film from the City College of New York at the time. In coming to terms with her father's passing, the first-time filmmaker sought out Bay's small village, making the long journey from New York to meet him. For three months, Hoang lived with Bay and his seven daughters, chronicling their lives day by day.

“The story [talks] about a man who's called the crier of the village, and he's [sung] at funerals most of his life,” explains Hoang. “He celebrates death through the process of singing, and he has seven daughters who cannot take his career because they are daughters so he has no one to follow his steps.”

The resulting short, The Funeral Singer, became Hoang's first documentary effort, released last May. Since its debut, the film has played at festivals around the world, from New York to Guangzhou, Montreal to Bogota. Its measured, lyrical storytelling treads a fine line between truth and fiction.

“It's just the way I feel because, for me, art is very – the unreal things talk about the real things so, for me, there is no real line between real or unreal,” says Hoang. “The unreal things, the nonfiction things, tell about fiction and fiction actually reflects nonfiction, so I like to adopt both styles of movie-making in order to get the feeling of reality.”

Now, fresh from a successful international run, The Funeral Singer held its second Vietnamese showing at last week's Future Shorts Vietnam (and will play again tomorrow evening); the film was also screened privately at Hoa Sen University earlier this year.

While the short film festival affords filmmakers like Hoang an opportunity to showcase their work, it's also a learning experience for aspiring directors.

“For me, when [Future Shorts] puts the local films and international films beside each other, there's always the comparison of how different the filmmakers are [when] making movies and seeing the world,” says Hoang. “Watching the international films, they make really good quality and very well-told stories which, for me, I learn from that, and it also makes me think of how can I tell stories so I can bring that story to an international audience.”

Here's a preview of Hoang's The Funeral Singer: