Film

Saigon Electric

D: Stephane Gauger

Fri, Oct 28, 2011
8 pm
Admission 5 / 3 €
Saigon Electric

Feature film, USA/Vietnam 2011, 109 min., Original with English subtitles

The culture of Hip Hop has long been translated into different national and commercial music cultures and lost most of its original political urgency. In the case of Vietnam however, we find an urban youth vibrantly engaging with Hip Hop to express and negotiate its precarious situation between tradition and modernity. For Saigon Electric, Gauger cooperated with the actual hip hop community to not only find a stunning underground talent in Vietnam, but to give the teenagers a voice and present to speak of their daily lives, struggles and dreams.
Mai is a traditional ribbon dancer from the countryside and arrives to the big city of Saigon in hopes of being admitted to the national dance academy. Here, she meets the rebellious Kim, a hip hop dancer from a local crew, and enters into a world of newly defined moves, aspirations and battles. Rivalry and romance between the different crew members soon begin to blossom, aggravated by the threat of a transnational market system to replace their community training center with a profit-making hotel.