The Love Market traces the journey and growth of four little girls belonging to the Black Hmong tribe who live in the remote town of Sapa, atop the lush green valley in the highlands of North Vietnam. When Sapa opened it gates to the tourist trade in 1990, the Black Hmong women, noticing that their young daughters enchanted the tourists, began to use these girls as bait to sell their embroidery. Over time, the ‘agency’ of embroidery became an also-ran because the girls began to act as tourist guides directly. Today, around 200 Hmong girls, their ages ranging between seven and eighteen, live independently in Sapa to sell embroidery and support their families back home in the village.
Shalom Almond visited Sapa as a tourist and returned many times to live with the Hmong girls. Shalom soon discovered, that the girls don’t just sell embroidery, they are really selling love and friendship to tourists as a means for survival. That is why she decided to call the film The Love Market. “From the moment I arrived in Sapa, I fell in love with the Hmong girls. The girls showed me around Sapa, invited me to their village…and even took me techno dancing. But when I began to look past their charming exterior, I could see their lack of supervision and late nights partying with tourists was creating a very complex and confused community of girls. Over the years I became close friends with four Hmong girls and followed their stories as they struggled to come of age in the face of tourism. Mang is eleven, street smart and dreams of a better life beyond selling on the streets. So is sixteen and has recently divorced her Hmong husband for the freedom life offers in Sapa. She is fourteen and feels torn between working in Sapa and returning to the village. La is nine and we followed her journey from a shy village girl to becoming the youngest tourist guide in Sapa. As the Vietnamese authorities launch Sapa as its premiere tourist destination, these four girls represent the last stand of a vanishing way of life. The girls’ stories explore the themes of seeking love, cultural identity and the pressures of children living in an adult world. The Hmong girls are extremely savvy and their stories are intimate and emotive,” explains Shalom.
Surprisingly, the little girls are so street-smart and cocky in their behaviour and speech that one feels sad about their not even being aware of having lost out on their childhood. They have never been to school yet can speak impeccable English, French and the local dialects enough to push a tough bargain when they need to. “One dollar for one picture,” says one of the four into the camera, as a tourist wants to click her picture. They pepper their conversations with adult language that borders on four-letter slang. The girls are pretty, colourful, extremely smart and are confident of realising their aim of settling down to marriage and family life. As the film unfolds, we see the girls grow up to become teenagers. One is training to become a hair stylist and beautician while another is married to a peasant boy from the village and a third is planning to marry her American friend she met when he came in as a tourist. “Over the years, I have seen some very inappropriate behaviour from male tourists but no, luckily the four young women who participated in my film are very street-smart and savvy and have never had any trouble” explains Shalom when asked if she had seen any cases of sexual exploitation of these girls by the tourists.
Yet, there is a darkened scene shot in the night where one discovers adult shadows pulling the hand of an unwilling little girl, visible only in silhouette. Shalom tries to clear doubts. She says, “at this stage, tourism is still quite new in Sapa and the sex tourism industry has not developed here yet. Many of the girls do dream of having a tourist ‘boyfriend’ who are often much older than them, but none of the girls accept money for sex. Like most young teenage girls they are more interested in finding love and romance.” She adds that none of her sponsors, such as The Foundation for Young Australians, The South Australian Youth Arts Board, and South Australian Film Corporation “placed any pressure on me at all in terms of the content of the film and in terms of how I wanted to tell the story. I am grateful for the freedom this gave me to develop long-term relationships with the main characters in the film and experiment with the best way to tell their stories.
Has this been an enriching experience for Shalom? “Making this film has been the most rewarding experience of my life so far personally and professionally. As a film maker the journey has been huge. Having to produce, write, shoot, sound record, direct all by myself and sometimes trek through mountains (and I am not the fittest person!) to get the footage was sometimes overwhelming, but in retrospect I couldn’t have made the film any other way,” she sums up.
