Precious. Rare. For Sale.
Precious. Rare. For Sale. takes a broad sweep at the presentation of nature in Vietnamese moving images from the 1990s. From being an abode for majestic and magical beasts, to serving as a backdrop for war heroics and social realist tragedies, representations of nature have been shaped by Vietnam’s changing socio-political contexts. Reflecting on how filmmakers have portrayed the environment, Bùi questions the ethics of exploiting nature for the camera. While early ethnographic films shot by the French depicted the Vietnamese jungle as an untouched, primitive landscape, today’s images of razed forests and neatly-partitioned land plots reveal how nature has become a commodity for a rising middle-class. Captured on screen by property developers and thrill-seeking vloggers alike, nature’s images shapeshift constantly, feeding into an endless loop of mediated consumption.