Films – a pre-station cultural weapon, clearing the way …

First of all, to talk about the handling of crises that are specific to the biosphere of Vietnamese culture, politics and communication, especially the legal factor, if only playing the flag in the media is not eating. lose, and rely on chance. It was just a solution to breath to suffocate, or raise flags of dead ships floating in the ocean.

With the development of the digital content industry globally, the Vietnamese market has emerged with overseas movie-watching services provided across borders to Vietnam (OTT television). These services are provided on the App Store and Google Play Store platforms including: Netflix, iFlix, Apple TV, We TV, iQiYi. Especially the explosion of Chinese movies through two apps We TV (from Tencent) and iQIYI (by Baidu). These two apps are offering tens of thousands of Chinese movies, series, dramas, and game shows. Meanwhile, for many years, Vietnamese television stations have invested a lot of money to buy Chinese and Hong Kong films to broadcast on television according to the tastes of the audience.

Like many other countries, Vietnamese law quite carefully controls the content of imported films, both movies and films broadcast on television. But when the US and Chinese online movie-watching application rushed to provide the service, thousands of movies were provided directly to Vietnamese users without the content censorship by authorities. This of course will greatly affect the television market and viewers in Vietnam.

In previous articles, ICTnews analyzed the significant impact of cross-border OTT television on the pay TV market in Vietnam. As for the cultural aspect, when Chinese films enter the Vietnamese market too easily on the Internet, how will it affect the culture and lifestyle of Vietnamese youth?

Talking with ICTnews about the above issue, researcher Le Ngoc Son said: “Films, or cultural works are considered by many countries as a strategic front-end tool to enter foreign markets. About 20 years ago, Vietnam was heavily influenced by this strategy from Korea. At that time, Korea landed in the Vietnamese market with films that initially attracted the Vietnamese public. When the wave of Korean movies and music has been successful and has had a great impact on Vietnamese youth, the trends that young people have to follow such as fashion, cosmetics, food … even movies also affects the language, the way of life “.

According to expert Le Ngoc Son, no tools go into other countries as effectively as the film path, the film’s influence is slowly absorbed but the effect is long-term. When people fall in love with the characters in the movie, people will follow, follow, follow and even change the trend of life, lifestyle like the movie.

Expert Le Ngoc Son said that in order to coordinate the public, one only needs to grasp two things: the content of the message and the channel to convey the message. The movies here are message content. And the transmission channel is applications, websites, and even foreign enterprises willing to spend money to dominate. If we are not careful with these shadows, in the long run we will be overwhelmed, invaded in terms of sovereignty and media space on the Internet, and cultural values ​​are at risk of being damaged.

Anti-invasion culture

Researcher Le Ngoc Son analyzed: “In countries with long-standing cultural influences like Vietnam, movies are easier to“ tie up ”to the public in films with similar cultural contents. If Vietnam does not have a smart selection method, there will be many risks, contents related to politics and sovereignty will be cleverly integrated through those films ”.

So how to manage when movies are “invading” the Vietnamese market on the Internet? Expert Le Ngoc Son said that, in terms of management, it is necessary to have strict sanctions to limit the influence in the current new media environment. The State management agencies of the media and culture of Vietnam must adopt management measures suitable to the new situation. Because content spreading on the Internet is difficult to stop, there is no technical measure that can completely prevent it. But the government needs a set of guidelines for people to know which pages to watch and which pages not to watch. At the same time, there must be an investment strategy in domestic cinema, in order to have historical films, exploiting topics following the trends of young people, it is necessary to fill the gaps in domestic films.

“People overwhelm or invade culture through movies because we are weak. The solution here is not to fine or not to fine, to block or not to block movies coming from the other side of the border, but to find a way to strengthen our cinema ”, Researcher Le Ngoc Son Phat expression.

Minh Quyen

According to Le Ngoc Son