Vietnam's New Cinema Law
Can support overcome censorship?
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I don’t discuss pop culture here very often, but today I want to cover something that I have a lot of interest in, though isn’t as existentially important as something like the public health system: movies. I love movies, especially going to the cinema to watch them, and this has been a big part of my life in Vietnam since I moved here in 2010. Sometimes this is an exercise in frustration: lots of prestige Oscar bait doesn’t get released here, though that has improved somewhat in recent years, and ham-fisted censorship of violence or nudity is common, but I still find seeing a movie with a crowd to be a great time. (And why not, when an IMAX costs about US$6.)
The New Law
On June 15, the National Assembly approved the revised Law on Cinematography, which will go into effect on January 1, 2023. It updates the 2006 Cinema Law and covers two primary topics: movies distributed online, and foreign film productions operating in Vietnam.
Regarding the former, the law settled on requiring movies to be examined both before and after they are released online, though as with most laws, there are a lot of vague areas that need to be fleshed out by ensuing decrees. For example, it’s unclear what this means for movies released on Netflix, which has no physical presence in Vietnam.
In recent years the Vietnamese government has ordered Netflix to remove three foreign TV shows from its platform in Vietnam for depicting China’s ‘nine-dash line’ map of the East Sea. (In 2019, the Dreamworks movie Abominable was banned for the same reason, and the Tom Holland action movie Uncharted got the same treatment earlier this year. (In 2017, Netflix also removed Full Metal Jacket at Vietnam’s request over the movie’s depiction of Vietnamese people.)
As mentioned, this aspect of the law remains unclear and isn’t worth spending too much time on right now. The regulations regarding foreign productions are more interesting.