Cinema
Le Printemps
Anonymous · 1977
Synopsis
A series of songs and dances celebrating the liberation of the country and its new momentum, in which the music and dances of the Lao and of the other peoples of the territory follow one another. The numbers run on without a plot, and the performance takes the place of a film. The Lao title is unknown, as are the name of whoever directed it, those of the performers, and even the length of the film.
Context
The film was made entirely in Beijing, by a Chinese technical crew, with Lao performers: the Lao People's Democratic Republic, proclaimed in December 1975, had at that time neither a studio nor a laboratory. It is not a fiction but a filmed show, a form that allied regimes used to represent a liberation; a database describes it as a sequence of Lao music and dances and those of other peoples of the country. The only two feature-length fiction films produced there since 1975 came later, in 1983 and then in 1988, and the cinema department of the Ministry of Culture kept the monopoly of production until 1989. No source gives the Lao title of this one, nor its running time, and one database dates it to 1976 against 1977 elsewhere.
Who it is for
Neither the running time nor the language is documented. It is worth knowing that it is not a story but a sequence of sung and danced numbers, a genre that Laos then shared with its allies.
Prizes and reception
The oldest title retained by the chronologies of Lao cinema after 1975, a place it owes to its date more than to its ambition.