This poignant and shocking documentary takes us to the mountains of northern Vietnam, and these idyllic mountain landscapes, beautiful surroundings seem to be in complete contrast to what is happening there. It is rural Vietnam where some old and ancient customs are still followed, and one of these old customs is the kidnapping of girls. When they reach the age of 12 or 13, local girls are in danger there because it is customary for boys their age or a few years older to kidnap them, rape them and then take them as their wives. And this is something that has obviously been happening there for generations and something that practically everyone takes for granted, and the women there have resigned themselves to such fates.
In this way, the parents of the main protagonist, a 12-year-old girl named Di, also got married, and her older sister was kidnapped when she was 14 years old. And Di, a little girl with big eyes and pink cheeks, is aware of what is in store for her. And very quickly because a village kid, maybe a year or two older than her, makes no secret of his intentions and plans to kidnap her and make her his wife, regardless of what she lets him know she doesn’t want. Vietnamese filmmaker Ha Le Diem filmed “Children of the Mist” in a fly-on-the-wall style, in a way that doesn’t interfere with the story at all, but only captures what’s happening in front of it.
This film was screened at practically all the world’s most important documentary film festivals and caused quite a bit of controversy because, among other things, it questions the usual practice of the author not interfering in the story. Apparently, Ha Le Diem decided to record a primitive entographic event from her country, probably not even assuming what to do when what she wants to record actually starts happening. These are the moments in which the author simply cannot remain calm and when the boy and his family really try to kidnap Di, she and her team will simply have to intervene and will try to protect her by convincing the kidnappers that the girl does not want that.
And it’s not just the brutality of the act that shocks here, but from start to finish everything seems so shocking, unreal, as if from another planet. While it’s normal for women to work all day in the rice fields, men are total workers from morning to night. Drunk as pigs, they collapse from alcohol, so Dia’s father practically does not understand what is happening to his daughter, how much he is anointed. And it’s not just the men, but also the women, I guess when they finish working in the fields, they immediately join them. They separate old and young almost like in Bjelovar, so in the beginning Di reveals that at the moment when her sister was kidnapped, her mother was so drunk that she didn’t even realize what happened for two days. Everything here from beginning to end is so unreal, sad and shocking.