The movie Urban Genesis by the French director and choreographer Fu Le tells us the story of Phuong, who returns back home, to her village, after being released from prison. Le uses documentary techniques like an interview-confession with the main character and creates a curious and unusual form of screendance movie.

In the beginning, using Phuong words, the director clearly reveals his motivation for making the movie and gives us the key to interpret the messages in his creative inventions „While I was in prison, I learned to find the freedom in me’’.

In the movie freedom is not the literal freedom – in the sense of right for freedom, equality, civil rights and so on. Here freedom is shown through a more personal and intimate lens. Here freedom is a process for achieving inner balance and peace. It is the conscious freedom of the will to accept or reject the changing reality; the freedom to go on or to give up; the freedom to accept love or to leave it in the past; the freedom to love even when you are rejected. 

One other question is whether technological and economic growth make us freer and happier. Whether the urbanisation and the apparent urban comfort create distance between people and alienate us from ourselves. Do they limit our own horizons in between the walls of the box-like apartments we live in? Do they steal our spontaneity and the desire to communicate with others and the world?

Phuong says that after walking out of prison she finds her home and village changed. Everything that she remembers and charishes is gone and replaced by invisible bars inside the minds of  the free people – „The prison of the mind is scarier than the prison behind bars.“

Phuong finds Khang, her childhood sweetheart, but she no longer even knows him. In her memories they both ride an old bike in the dusty streets and are filled with joy and desire to live. Now Khang is desperate, distant and hopeless, riding his moped in loneliness. He joylessly shows Phuong the new reality. Their parents, friends and close ones have left, some of them even died. The clay kilns in the brickyards have burnt out. The factories have closed. Khang has accepted the fact that has to go to Saigon, where he has found a new job.  

Vietnam is currently experiencing massive urbanisation and this artisanal brickyard belongs to a bygone era, when houses were built with earth from the fields and water from the river Mekong. The brickyard embodies the origin of cities, the transition from wild nature to geometric constructions and loss of innocence. The cluttered storages deepen the feeling of uselessness. The countless bricks are arranged as thick and high walls, as if they are a labyrinth, connecting the past and the future. The main characters seem lost in this dead zone. This is strongly visible in the choreography. They both take turns to dance alone or in duet with different objects from their surroundings – sand, clay, ashes, wood chips, fire, digger, two-wheeled car, assembly line, a boat. This makes the viewer feel their unquenchable thirst for connection with somebody or something.  As if their bodies try to find the lover’s dance but can not reach the closeness and intimacy of real touch. The bodies interact only to exchange, give or take different objects from baked or raw clay. The firm tiles are a symbol of the heaviness of memories and the raw clay produce deform in the hands of the characters, as if showing us their anxiousness and unwillingness to accept the insecure and unknown future. Only in one brief moment Phuong and Khang exchange a few hugs, holding onto each other to save themselves from the abyss of despair. 

In the last years most of the brickyards in Mekong have closed and Saigon has developed and grown faster than ever. The city engulfs the small villages the same way as lava incinerates the fertile lands and forests near an active volcano. The small huts and clay houses are replaced by concrete buildings. It is like the battle between David and Gloiath, but the other way around. 

Urban development questions the possibility of finding a place we can love, and its survival when time passes faster than the clouds. At the end of the movie, when the main characters have accepted that they have lost everything precious, an elevator takes us on the roof of a new skyscraper where we can see the endless horizon filled with flying kites.

Fu Le is a recognized director and choreographer of Tetrapode Dance Company in France. He graduated from the National school of Fine Arts in Paris and then studied physical theatre and contemporary dance in South America and Europe. In the last few years he has focused his research in Asia, exploring social problems in relation to urbanisation. Now he works on the verge of dance, sculpture and video and leads visual arts to the intimacy of physical sensations. His cinematic method is based on the single-shot frame, created by the precise movement and choreography of the camera itself. Video is part of the choreographic explorations from the beginning of his career. One day Fu Le found a computer on the street and took it, and months later bought a small camera that he used for almost 10 years. He started making movies because at the time he couldn’t present his works live in theatres. He travelled a lot and filming was a way to document his choreographic experiments. 

In one of his interviews he says „ …video-dance is a medium with a unique identity. It is not about the capturing of a performance, nor about creating a sequence of rhythmic images but about a real fusion of cinematography and choreography. A dance movie is a movie, but made according to choreographic principles that define the means of expression, the same way as the filming gear does. The single-shot allows me to explore this fusion because everything happens simultaneously at one place’’. 

After years of creating dance movies with single-shot techniques in Urban Genesis Le returns to  the roots, to his first attempts in cinematography, to the passion and curiosity to explore the montage as a main technique in cinema. Another sign for this return is the fragmentation of the story and the documentary feel in the episodes. 

The movie Urban Genesis has won multiple awards in festivals in Europe. Asia, North and South America.