International Premiere | In Competition
Vietnam, 2026, 130’, Vietnamese
Directed by: Phan Gia Nhat Linh
Cinematography (color): Trung Nam Hoang
Music: Tran Huu Tuan Bach
Producers: Phan Gia Nhat Linh, Charlie Nguyen
Production Companies: Chanh Phuong Films, Anh Teu Studio, Sidus And Teu Entertainment, VN Pictures, HKFilm, Lotte Entertainment
Cast: Van Son, Le Khanh, Miu Le, Lien Binh Phat, Quang Minh, Hua Vi Van, Hong-Anh
Date of First Release in Territory: April 24th, 2026
A triumph at the 2018 Far East Film Festival and later a megahit in its home country, the Japanese film
One Cut of the Dead by Ueda Shinichiro begins like a your run-of-the-mill horror movie. A zombie film is being shot – it is a small independent production in a rural location that, however, is cursed: some members of the crew turn into real zombies and attack the others. It follows the usual sequence of survivors fleeing, chased by the living dead, as well as by the director who has gone mad and happily films the events unfolding (“Action!”). But the film, shot with a relentless handheld camera, appears to be totally incompetent: confusing scenes, absurd stretches of dead time. The viewer is disoriented. How did this mess get accepted at the FEFF? And then, after about 30 minutes, the film ends! The end credits roll.
The second part provides the backstory: one month earlier, the director had been contacted to shoot a half-hour zombie movie for television, live and in a single take (
One Cut of the Dead, get it?). The third part takes us to the other side of the camera: we witness the troubled making of the film-within-the-film, which, being live, cannot be interrupted. Everything that previously seemed absurd finds a narrative justification. A kind of vertigo is created: a film about zombies becomes a zombie story, but in reality it is a zombie film being shot, riddled with comedic difficulties. This meta-zombie comedy, made on a shoestring budget, travelled the world; there was also, in 2022, a (rather vacuous) French remake directed by Michel Hazanavicius.
Now a new remake of
One Cut of the Dead arrives from Vietnam, with a more substantial budget, directed by Phan Gia Nhat Linh. Here, the producers decide to title the one-take zombie film
Blood Moon Rite 8. Even if there are no previous installments. The logic behind it is to include an 8 in the title, both for good luck and for marketing reasons: a culturally recognizable sign of the producers’ aspiration towards commercial success. This detail is a testament that the film aims to be a portrait of contemporary Vietnamese film industry. The scene of the first script reading is amusing, with the star Phat acting superior, and the actress Chiin Chiin playing the silly ingénue, despised by the former because she’s a TikTok influencer. A witty detail: in the film-within-the-film, the characters (obviously played by Vietnamese actors) have Korean names; but in the confusion, when things start to go wrong, they forget them, and in a couple of cases call each other by their real Vietnamese names, which adds to the viewer’s sense of disorientation.
The presence of Korean names is no accident: the TV zombie film has a Korean producer (in the Japanese film, the producer was the character actress Takehara Yoshiko, so iconic that she later appeared in Hazanavicius’s film as well). Why Korean? Because the Korean film industry is investing heavily in Southeast Asia, opening production offices and building movie theatres.
While closely following the Japanese original in terms of plot and dialogue,
Blood Moon Rite 8 tries to introduce some variations in nuance. The film gives more emphasis to the character of the director as an underdog and develops his relationship with his daughter who despises him (full of intellectual pretensions, she considers him a trashy filmmaker), steering it towards melodrama.
Broadly speaking, the film introduces a more comical tone, both in the film-within-the-film, with its acting rather over-the-top compared to the Japanese original, as well as in the overall narrative.
These films play on the ambiguity of the camera’s status, of camera look, of directly addressing the camera (“Keep rolling!”). They remind us that the camera that records, even when we see one within the frame, is always one step behind what is being filmed.
Phan Gia Nhat Linh
Phan Gia Nhat Linh is one of the household names in the Vietnamese film industry. His directorial debut, Sweet 20 (2015), broke box office records as the highest-grossing film in Vietnam at the time. His producing debut, Blood Moon Party, also topped the box office in Vietnam in 2020. Em & Trinh, a biopic about one of the greatest composers in Vietnam, Trinh Cong Son, became the top-earning Vietnamese film in 2022, winning Silver Lotus at the Vietnamese National Film Festival in 2023.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
2015 – Sweet 20
2017 – The Girl from Yesterday
2022 – Em & Trinh
2026 – Blood Moon Rite 8