With his wife, Thi watched the documentary about his ugly habit when the Medical Committee Netherlands-Vietnam recently screened Trong Hay Ngoai Tay Em (With or Without Me) in Hanoi. She broke down, too, and cried at the scenes of her husband taking a needle to himself.

The couple La and Thi in a scene , Photo: Swann Dubus

“What you have seen is not a film but my life,” La told the audience at the end of the screening.

The documentary, produced by Tran Phuong Thao and her French partner, Swann Dubus, features Thi and Trung, another HIV-positive heroin addict in northern Dien Bien Province, near the main heroin route from Laos to China. Trong Hay Ngoai Tay Em is streaming free online until June 11 at dafilms.com/film/8175-trong-hay-ngoai-tay-em.

In the film, Thi and Trung both face family pressure for their addictions, but with starkly different reactions: Thi wants to kick the habit, while Trung just wants to die.

The filmmakers had talked to nearly 70 families affected by HIV in several mountainous provinces in the north, but did not decide to make the documentary until they met Thi and Trung.

Narrated by Thao and shot by Dubus over the course of six months in 2010, Trong Hay Ngoai Tay Em received the Le prix Planète Rouge grant from FIDLab, an international co-production platform for film projects in Marseille in 2001. It is a co-production of the Medical Committee Netherlands-Vietnam, funded by the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Hanoi and with cooperation from the Royal Tropical Institute.

Thi has now entered a methadone treatment program. With improved health and a job, Thi now concentrates on volunteering to help others with HIV, rather than his old worries about scraping together money for heroin.

The film also shows Trung, who has changed his mind about suicide, visiting his father’s grave after a decade of neglect. Seeing that the mound is covered with weeds, Trung quickly searches for something to clean it up.

Tran Phuong Thao and Swann Dubus

Source: Tuoi Tre