“Hollywood” Village

Vietnam’s movie world calls Tay Mo ‘Hollywood Village’. For nearly a decade, this quite old village on the outskirts of Hanoi has been the setting for a number of films about country life, plus sitcoms on the theme of “weekend get-together’’.

A wide brick-paved path leads through the moss-covered gate bearing lines of Chinese calligraphy. By a pond under the shade of tall bamboos, elderly people and children sit and weave nets, make thread and spin silk.

As well as a few two or three-storey concrete houses, there are many old wooden houses sitting among fruit orchards. In the middle of the village is a spacious communal hosurrounded by many mature trees up to one and a half metres in diameter.

For generations, the communal hohas been the heart of the village. Standing at the junction of five brick-paved roads, it is a sacred place for worship, festivals and meetings.

I stopped at Ms Xuyen’s hobecathere was a group of people shooting a movie by a pond. I was told that they were students in their final year at the University of Stage and Film, and they were completing their thesis by making a TV show called The Six Season.

Nguyen Vu, who has been to Tay Mo several times in search of settings for his films, showed me a pile of costumes and props such as wooden boxes, a bamboo bed, a wooden rice-mill and earthenware pots. “ We asked the villagers for these things and keep them at Ms Yen’s house,” he said.
Apart from the old houses, the family ancestral temples in Tay Mo also attract directors. There are eight of them, as well as about a dozen pagodas. The villagers regularly gather at the family temples for meetings with relatives and to give to gifts to children who do well at school.

Film director Tran Luc said:” In 1997 we went round villages looking for settings for a movie and we chose Tay Mo becait’s full of authentic Vietnamese features- old houses, lines of bamboos and bridges. The villagers are simple, down to earth and scholarly. Also, Tay Mo is near Hanoi, which is very convenient for us.”

Behind a pond and a bed of violets is the temple of the Nghiem Xuan family, decorated with parallel sentences and elaborate pictures. When I arrived at the gate I turned to leave becaI saw crowds of people and thought the temple was busy, but a small woman came to the gate and said:” Please come in- they are all actors, not the Nghiem Xuan family.”

“ There are not that many today,” she added. “Sometimes three or four film crews come at the same time and then there are hundreds of people filling the yard. It’s very interesting”

In fact there were dozens of motorcycles, a generator, and scores of people inside. The elderly people and the children of the village gathered along the path to the pond, talking about the roles they had played- most of them had acted as villagers in the film.

“ I’ve been acting all my life” said one crew member, Ms Phung Kim Thoa. “ I’m always pleased with my roles in films shot in Tay Mo becait is not only beautiful but also has very interesting people, open and friendly. Everyone wants to see themselves and their houses in movies.”

Mr Tran Dang Thu, whose old hohas been seen in many films, said:” We get dozens of thousands of dong for each scene and ten thousand of for a part in a movie. That’s pretty good money for us farmers, but we take more pride and pleasure in being know on television as residents of a beautiful village with a long history of culture and tradition.

Source The Guide