The Commitment of Women Through the Production of a Creative Documentary about Indochina

The documentary La belle d’occident, en quête de l’Indochine d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (2023, 47’) discusses the place and investment of women in research and in the way that they see others, whether from an anthropological, artistic (particularly cinematographic), literary, gendered, post-colonial (i.e. historical) or involved point of view. The starting point for this research is the novel The western nice woman, by Mrs Huỳnh Thị Bảo Hòa written in 1927, a love story between a French woman and a Vietnamese man. This novel is based on a true story that praises the place of women and denounces certain colonial behaviours. Thi Phuong Ngoc Nguyen, a teacher-researcher at Aix-Marseille University, translated the novel in 2021, so that it could be used in the field to find clues about the customs of the period in relation to the soldiers involved. A teacher-researcher also at the University of Aix-Marseille, and as a documentary filmmaker, I accompanied her to Alsace and Verdun in France, and Vietnam, to make this documentary about this adventure and capture current realities while, at the same time, searching for traces of the colonial era. It takes now the form of a creative documentary. [...]