Join us at the bar for networking drinks from 7.15pm and screening at 8.40pm.

Nam and Viêt love each other. Both are miners, working 1000 meters below ground where danger awaits and darkness prevails. Coal earns them a living, while polluting the land and the sea. Black sea. Black coal. Burnt coal. Wet coal. Dusty coal. When Nam decides to leave the country via an agent who smuggles people in shipping containers, it causes a rift between his love for Viet and the desires for his own future. With a world premier at the Cannes Film Festival, the critically acclaimed VIÉT AND NAM was banned in Vietnam due to its "gloomy, deadlocked, and negative view" of the country. However, we celebrate its fearless, sensitive portrayal of a Vietnamese gay couple navigating a turbulent historical and emotional landscape, inspired by a tragic event which lead to the death of 39 migrant workers found in a refrigerated truck in Essex in 2019 .

129 MINS

Dir: Trương Minh Quý Prod: Bianca Balbuena / Bradley Liew

QUEER COGNITION: A Season of Cinema Beyond the Binary is a curated series (May–August 2025) celebrating the complexity, resilience, and radical creativity of queer lives around the world. Spanning decades and continents, the season centres voices that challenge convention, reclaim space, and reimagine identity beyond binaries. Presented in the lead-up to Pride London, Queer Cognition brings together groundbreaking narratives and documentaries that resist erasure and ignite cultural memory, exploring queerness as a living, evolving force, rooted in history and defined by collective creativity. 

Programme supported by Film Hub London, managed by Film London. Proud to be a partner of the BFI Film Network, funded by the National Lottery www.filmlondon.org.uk/filmhub.