About the Symposium
The Weight of Mountains (TWOM) Symposium 2026 is an international academic symposium in film and media studies, with a primary focus on Vietnamese and Southeast Asian screen cultures and on how cinema documents, reimagines, and gives form to the region’s landscapes, urban transformations, and contested histories. Co-hosted by RMIT University Vietnam and Fulbright University Vietnam, the symposium brings together scholars from film studies and audiovisual studies, cultural studies, environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and related fields to examine cinema’s engagement with place, memory, and environment in an era of rapid urbanization and ecological change. The symposium underscores the significance of authorial and experimental film practices and of speculative fiction emerging in our region.
The symposium is organised in conjunction with the fourth iteration of The Weight of Mountains, a periodic international film residency and research platform whose 2026/2027 program places international filmmakers in residence in Ho Chi Minh City for three months. This urban turn – situating the residency in a city shaped by colonial histories, wartime trauma, Đổi Mới transformations, and accelerating development – provides the occasion for a focused scholarly conversation about cinema’s relationship to place, history, and environment in Vietnam and the wider Southeast Asian region. The symposium will feature keynote addresses by leading Vietnamese and international scholars, artist presentations by TWOM resident filmmakers, and presentations of selected papers.

Partners include:
The Weight of Mountains (TWOM) team, RMIT Vietnam (DFV and SCD), Fulbright University Vietnam (Arts & Media Studies), Trigger Film Academy



Call for Abstracts:
Ho Chi Minh City is a city of layered temporalities – part and contemporary – and Vietnamese cinema has long been one of the most searching instruments for reading those layers. The city itself operates as a cinematic text: its streets and interiors producing divergent spatial imaginaries shaped by who holds the camera and from where they look. Like in Tran Anh Hung’s Cyclo, urban space can be a site of the uncanny and memories, the promised land, or the space of autoreflective questions. Drawing on Guy Debord’s psychogeography and Timothy Cresswell’s understanding of place as practiced and performed, we ask how filmmakers navigate, intervene in, and reimagine the urban and ecological spaces of the region through experimental narratives, tools and future-oriented imaginaries.

Contemporary film studies has been decisively shaped by the turn toward critical transnationalism, insisting on interrogating the uneven power relations, industrial infrastructures, and cultural politics that condition the movement of films, filmmakers, and capital across borders. For Vietnamese and Southeast Asian cinemas, this means attending simultaneously to inter-Asian circuits of production and distribution, to festival economies and co-production networks, and to the diasporic communities whose experiences and investments shape what gets made and how it travels.

The Weight of Mountains residency operates as what Foucault called a heterotopia – a space of productive dislocation and otherness, deliberately positioned at the margins of dominant film cultures. This symposium extends that heterotopic logic into the academic register, asking what forms of knowledge become possible when international filmmakers and researchers engage seriously with the specific textures of Vietnamese urban life: its soundscapes, its landscapes and ecologies as sites of historical sedimentation and environmental change, and its postcolonial politics of the gaze. The symposium is equally attentive to what cinema can do when it turns toward the nonhuman world – the Mekong Delta, the urban waterways, the forest edges and street ecologies that constitute the lived environment of Vietnam and the wider region, bringing further questions about how film documents landscape, registers environmental change, and attends to the nonhuman dimensions of place.




Thematic Strands
We invite submissions that engage with one or more of the following strands. Papers should present a clear research question, theoretical framework, and original contribution to the field.

STRAND 1.
Colonial and Postcolonial Cinemas of Southeast Asia
Vietnamese and Southeast Asian cinemas carry the unresolved weight of French colonialism, Cold War intervention, and the ongoing politics of decolonial representation. Papers in this strand might address:
• The postcolonial gaze and ethics of representation in Vietnamese documentary and fiction film
• French colonial cinema in Indochina and its afterlives in contemporary Vietnamese film culture
• Decolonial aesthetics and counter-narratives in Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, and Thai cinema
• The postcolonial condition of Indochinese cinemas across Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and the shared legacies of French colonialism
• Colonial urban space and its cinematic re-inscription in Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh, and Vientiane
• The ethics of the outsider filmmaker in Vietnam and Southeast Asia – questions of access, positionality, and the politics of cross-cultural representation


STRAND 2.
Memory and the Afterlives of 1975
Post-1975 Vietnamese cinema remains one of the most contested sites of historical memory in world cinema. Papers in this strand might address:
• Historical voices in post-1975 Vietnamese film
• Wartime affect in Vietnamese cinema
• Heterogeneous temporalities, colonial haunting, and the fantastic in Southeast Asian cinema
• Uncanny urban spaces
• Generational shifts in the remembrance of war and revolution across Vietnamese film


STRAND 3.
Transnational Return
Papers in this strand might address:
• Transnational desire, mobility, and national belonging
• The aesthetics of displacement, longing, and return in film
• Insider and outsider representations of Vietnam and the returning gaze
• Transnational co-productions and festival circulation
• Digital platforms, streaming, and new circuits of Vietnamese film distribution


STRAND 4.
Urbanism and the Cinematic City
Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi are among the most cinematically rich urban environments in contemporary Southeast Asia, shaped by Đổi Mới reforms, rapid development, and the layering of colonial and socialist pasts. Papers in this strand might address:
• Ho Chi Minh City as cinematic city-text
• Psychogeography, the dérive, and spatial practice in Vietnamese urban cinema
• Postcolonial urbanism and the layering of colonial and contemporary temporalities in Vietnamese cityscapes
• Rural-urban boundaries and migration narratives in contemporary Vietnamese cinema
• Bangkok, Manila, Phnom Penh, and other Southeast Asian cities as sites of cinematic spatial inquiry
• Infrastructural development, displacement, and the politics of urban transformation on screen


STRAND 5.
Independent Cinema and Alternative Exhibition in Southeast Asia
Beyond mainstream production, a vital ecosystem of independent and experimental cinema has emerged across the region, creating alternative circuits of production, distribution, and spectatorship. Papers in this strand might address:
• Critical transnationalism and the conditions of production, funding, and circulation of Southeast Asian independent film
• Alternative film exhibitions
• Independent film festivals and independent production circuits across Southeast Asia
• The role of digital platforms and transnational funding in enabling independent Southeast Asian filmmaking
• Distinct regional independent cinema identities
• The sonic and haptic dimensions of place in experimental Southeast Asian films


STRAND 6.
Landscape, Ecology, and Environmental Cinema
This strand invites scholarship on how cinema represents, interprets, and attends to the landscapes, ecologies, and natural environments of Vietnam and Southeast Asia. It encompasses documentary, essay film, and fiction practices that attend to environmental change, rural and riverine life, and the nonhuman world as subjects of serious cinematic inquiry. Papers in this strand might address:
• Landscape cinema and ecocinema studies in the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian context – how films document, aestheticise, and bear witness to environments under pressure
• The Mekong Delta as cinematic space – rivers, deltas, and rural waterways as subjects of documentary, fiction, and experimental filmmaking
• Climate cinema and the Anthropocene in Southeast Asian documentary and fiction film
• Sensory and immersive cinema – the use of duration, texture, and ambient sound to render nonhuman environments perceptible
• Process cinema and the nonhuman agencies – water, weather, infrastructure, animals – that constitute urban and rural life in Vietnam and the region


STRAND 7.
Festival Aesthetics, Slow Cinema, and Global Circulation
The growing international visibility of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian cinema raises important questions about the institutional and aesthetic conditions of that visibility. Papers in this strand might address:
• Transcendental style, slow cinema, and contemplative aesthetics in contemporary Vietnamese film
• The construction of “Vietnamese cinema” as a category within global film culture
• Co-production networks, international funding, and the shaping of film form for global audiences
• The tension between local spectatorship and international festival circuits in Vietnamese and Southeast Asian cinema
• Transnational frames for Asian cinema and the risks of Orientalist programming logics
• The role of film criticism, academic writing, and scholarly publishing in shaping the international reception of Southeast Asian cinema



SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Abstract requirements:
- Word count: 300–500 words, excluding references
- Language: English

Abstracts should include:
- Paper title
- 3 to 5 keywords
- Indication of which thematic strand(s) the paper engages
- Author name(s), institutional affiliation(s), bio note and email address(es) should be provided only in the submission form
- Please indicate your presentation format: online/face to face in the form

Author biography:
A short biography of 100–150 words per author should be submitted alongside the abstract

Presentation format:
A 20-minute academic paper presentation, followed by 10 minutes for questions and discussion

Review process:
All submissions will undergo blind peer review by an international panel of scholars. Selection criteria include intellectual rigour, theoretical sophistication, methodological clarity, engagement with Vietnamese and Southeast Asian contexts, and relevance to symposium themes. Authors should remove identifying information from the abstract document prior to submission

Submission portal: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/TWOM2026/Submission/Index

Symposium format:
The symposium will have a hybrid format. An additional online session will be held for online participants.



KEY DATES:
Abstract submission deadline: September 15, 2026
Notification of acceptance: October 2026
Full text submission: November 20, 2026
Symposium: December 10, 11, and 12, 2026
Symposium Venues:
-December 10, Online
-December 11, RMIT Unviersity, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
-December 12, Fulbright University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Abstract submissions:
https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/TWOM2026/Submission/Index

Please submit the abstracts through the submission system. *Some users encountered problems while using Safari browser. If you have problems with registering, please use a different browser.
Registration details to be announced. Please contact the organising committee for queries regarding accessibility requirements.
The organizers plan to publish an edited monograph containing expanded, selected articles submitted to the symposium. Details to be announced.

Enquiries: dfvhub.staff@rmit.edu.vn


Organising Committee
Khoa Trong Nguyen, Digital Film and Video Program Manager, RMIT Vietnam
Dr. Piotr Wajda, Lecturer, Professional Communications, RMIT Vietnam
Dr. Agnieszka Kiejziewicz, Design (Games), RMIT Vietnam
Tim Marshall, TWOM, Associate Lecturer, RMIT Melbourne
Melody Woodnutt, TWOM, Associate Lecturer, RMIT Melbourne
Dr. Linda Chen Zhang, Assistant Professor, Fulbright University Vietnam
Trinh Dinh Le Minh, Lecturer/Filmmaker, Fulbright University Vietnam
Director Lan Nguyen, Trigger Film Academy
Le Binh Giang, Trigger Film Academy