Before the Sea Forgets
Singapore|2025|Drama|Queer|17mins
Director: Ngoc Duy Le
Screenwriter:Ngoc Duy Le
Producer: Phan Nguyet Minh Nguyen, Wan Ping Looi
Cinematographer:Wan Ping Looi
Editor:Ngoc Duy Le
Art Director:Doan Gia Hy
Sound:Sigon Sound Production, Vu Thanh Long
Music:Nguyên Anh
Starring:Tran The Manh as The Young Man, Nguyen Le Son as The Older Lover
Synopsis
On Da Nang's peninsula, where echoes of war linger, a gay tourist couple searches for a forgotten Vietnamese soldier's grave, shadowed by a mysterious skate crew carving their paths.
Festival&Award

Directors’ Fortnight Cannes 2025
Director's Note
This film marks my first experimentation with the narrative genre, blending my queer perspective and personal experiences of love with family history and my hometown’s past. Its inspiration lies in my father's haunting 1980 notebook, a powerful memento from a friend deployed to Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese army to eliminate the remnants of the Pol Pot regime. His haunting plea—"In this world, killing is the greatest sin... Later, no matter what I’d become, please still, consider me your friend”—fuels my desire to honor lasting human connections. The film explores these bonds by pairing individuals and situating them in contrasting landscapes, while also subtly questioning portrayals of comradeship and patriotism. Timed with Vietnam's 50th reunification anniversary, it reflects the universal themes of separation, reunion, longing, and forgetting shared across generations. This notebook also features in my ongoing docufiction short, “Ngay Thang Khong Quen.”

Ngoc Duy Le
Born in 2000 in Da Nang, Le Ngoc Duy is a filmmaker exploring the politics of memory, history, queer expression, and Central Vietnamese heritage. His recent works examine the influence of official narratives in shaping collective memory and the dominant influence of larger systems on the construction of history.
"Before the Sea Forgets," his latest short film, was an official selection in Cannes’ Directors' Fortnight 2025 and a Queer Palm nominee. He is one of the Prince Claus Fund’s Seed Awardees 2025 and a Locarno Filmmakers Academy 2025 participant. In 2024, he received a production grant from the CJ Short Filmmaking Project in Vietnam.
As a member of A Sông Art Collective, Duy also organizes and co-curates Cinema of Peasants (Cinema CNN), a grassroots project promoting local independent cinema.