In 1923, in his article in Trung Bắc Tân Văn titled “A Cinematic Adaptation Of Kim Vân Kiều,” Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh imagined Kim Vân Kiều as a medium to capture the depth of the Vietnamese psyche through cinema—an art form introduced by colonial forces. The film, like the story it adapts, is marked by encounters, separations and reunions. Being Vietnam’s first film, Kim Vân Kiều (1924) represented an unprecedented marriage between Vietnamese literature and European cinematographic technology, a work then lost to time and later reconstructed—much like the turbulent connection between Kim and Kiều. Though now lost, the surviving stills from the film, preserved in a book published later by La Société Indochine Films & Cinémas, remain as evidence of Vietnamese cultural resistance against colonial dominance. By suturing these AI-restored fragments in slow cinema, we create a space-time for an encounter between past and present. This ephemeral connection parallels the story of Kim and Kiều, as viewers today engage with the film’s spectral presence, longing for meaning in what’s left and thinking about what could have been. Much like the fleeting encounter between Kim and Kiều, foreshadowing an inevitable separation, our interaction with this lost film is similarly fragile, leaving us to wonder:

“Now we meet, face to face at last,

Who knows if it’s not soon a dream from the past?”