Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

The film that garnered the prestigious Golden Camera award (for best first-time director) at the recent Cannes Film Festival is a captivating, dreamlike journey through the uncharted paths of nature, faith, and loss – a story that unfolds with rare inventiveness and unexpected universal resonances, while starting from a rudimentary backbone: After a car accident that leads his sister-in-law to her death and leaves his five-year-old nephew orphaned, a thirty-year-old man leaves Saigon and returns to his rural hometown. During a journey that resembles meditation, the traveler grapples with his own ghosts; his agnosticism, skepticism towards religious faith, the memory of his long-lost brother, and the reconnection with a past love who chose to become a nun. With its drifting camerawork, evocative use of natural light and the enjoyable wanderlust in nature, this is a film that restores our faith in many different registers.