This shopping street of the city of Vientiane, the Dongpalane, literally meaning “the place of the forest”, is the unity of place of the second opus of the trilogy Lines of flight .
The biased view of the movie was to extract, out of a two weeks shooting, an ordinary day in the life of that street (from 3 am to 11 pm). Just one single day, approached in the same way than in The Walking Man from Jiro Taniguchi, unceasingly pacing up and down the main road, focusing on the back of that street in the pre-existing villages and areas close by. Whereas the development of the Dongpalane, supported by the dynamism of its store keepers, is blooming economically speaking and very invasive in space, at the same time consequently, original forms of life disappear on its fringe, in its chinks. This is one of the immediate effects of the passage to “market socialism“, advocated by the Lao State, following the example of his strong neighbouring countries China and Vietnam, and of the apparition of a speculative (over)activity on land ownership.
The movie is the story in filigree of these forecasted disappearances; physical disappearance of the Nongchanh swamp area, a place of close interaction between a remarkable environmental ecosystem and the social and spatial organization of the populations living there. This movie tells a little bit about those who, to quote the sociologist Michel de Certeau, “live on the compromises they invent and the contradictions they handle, up to thresholds they can’t bear to exceed“.
We'll return to Vientiane to work on a postscript concerning the communities of Nongchanh, evacuated and then displaced 12km away from their work (the Khua Dinh market adjoining the swamp) by the Lao authorities, an effort to remember the henceforth imaginary village.
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