Writer and Filmmaker Tran Van Chinh

5680 €

To The Moon

I'll be working on a novella called 'To The Moon' during the residency. It takes place in an imagined near future where Moon travel has been commercialised and where rich tourists flee to space for weekend escapes and drunken stag parties. But in truth, Moon travel is a privilege few can afford. One of those few who are stuck on Earth is Ha Di, a young Vietnamese immigrant who works in a spaceport gift shop and is obsessed with escaping the social pressures of Earth to start a new life on the Moon. But as the story unfolds, Ha Di's paths will cross with others whose reality of living on the Moon is anything but glamorous. The Moon has a nice symbolism–it's forever been the subject of human imagination. Ancient people looked at the Moon and saw human faces or rabbits, and began to craft stories around those figures. The Moon has a strange, magnetic manipulation that I find very fitting to our character, who is drunk on her fantasies and has forgotten that those stories originated on Earth, from our boundless imagination. Everyone takes Earth for granted - yet our planet contains its own universe. 'To The Moon' will question the idea of 'the promised land' and uses sci-fi as a vessel to convey real-world problems. I hope to explore themes such as immigration, sense of belonging, identity, and love and intimacy in the age of interplanetary travel. The story is based on my short film project, also currently in development. While working on the short, I felt its potential to encompass a more comprehensive picture as humans move towards becoming a multi-planetary species. 'To The Moon' as a novella is currently in conceptual stages; however, by the time I hope to be in residence, I expect to have more clarity regarding plot, characters and overall direction. The story revolves around one protagonist but will potentially be told using different POVs from people of multiple walks of life in this imaginary yet believable world.