Rotterdam 2015 Review: THE INSEMINATOR, Banned But Not Forgotten

This year, the International Film Festival Rotterdam had a section on surrealism, and one of the films playing in it was Bui Kim Quy's The Inseminator. And it took the festival a lot of trouble to get the film, as it has famously been banned in its home country of Vietnam after being shown in Busan.

The reasons for its banning have not been revealed by the Vienamese censorship board, but are probably due to some nudity, depictions of local traditional magic, the looming specter of incest, and some disturbing dream images. But The Inseminator is not a typical scandal film, and someone wanting to see it because of controversy, will most likely come away disappointed.

The film depicts the life of a small family, living high up in the Vietnamese mountains. A farmer, his beautiful adult daughter and an adolescent boy. There is no electricity or warm water, indeed there are no other people living for miles and miles around.
Problems arise when, due to local customs, the boy needs to find a wife and continue the family's line of patriarchs. The boy is mentally handicapped, though, not even able to clean himself, let alone find a mate.

According to mythology, terrible punishments will be visited on the father in the afterlife if he allows the family name to end, so he gets increasingly desperate to solve his son's immaturity. His daughter wants to marry, but cannot leave the house before her brother, even though the boy is much younger.

Through the film, you see the farmer get consumed by his obsession. He cannot accept that his son will never become an adult, and tries to beat and punish more sense into the boy, to no avail. Potency-increasing potions are next. After those fail as well, the farmer takes more drastic measures...

The Inseminator is not an easy watch. You see a family in which all three members love one another dearly, but still end up doing terrible things to each other out of sheer desperation. The film is beautifully shot and very well acted, to the point where I was very surprised to hear that the actor playing the boy is, in fact, not mentally handicapped. In the first half you see how these people live, alone in this beautiful landscape, and it looks almost like a documentary, showing there is hard work but also pleasures in their lives. In the second half, as things go awry, this gets replaced with tasks, trials and suffering.

As the content of the film gets disturbing, it gets weirder as well. Dreams and hallucinations become more common, until you're never sure if what you see is actually happening or a metaphor. This may also have influenced the Vietnamese censors, for if you no longer know for sure what happens on-screen, how can you be sure it's not forbidden?

All in all I liked The Inseminator a lot but didn't love it. The film is slow and with a very strange pay-off at the end. But this is also an interesting film, and at times a striking, well acted one, with special props going to actress Nguyen Thi Thu Trang for doing her daring and demanding role.

Audiences in Rotterdam liked it as well, and awarded the film a very respectable 3.5 out of 5.