India, Vietnam working on ties to promote film shooting

Seeking to boost cultural cooperation, India and Vietnam have set the ball rolling for promoting each other as a "favourable destination" for shooting films.
"Vietnam had approached us with a proposal that pitched it as a favourable destination for filmmakers in India. Besides, soap operas, Bollywood movies are quite popular there, and we also wish to forge a bond in this segment," Secretary (East), External Affairs Ministry, Anil Wadhwa said.
The senior MEA official was speaking at the opening of an international seminar on 'Indo-Vietnam Cultural Relations: Retrospect and Prospect' organised by ICCR here.
"We are moving further in this direction, and a high-level delegation from India visited Vietnam last December at the invitation of the administration, and have found a few locations that could be used for shooting films," he said.

Endowed with natural beauty and world heritage sites, Vietnam is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in South East Asia, and places like Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Hoi An have been featured in many domestic and international film productions.
"Some of the places, our delegation identified during the visit are -- Ha Long Bay (a World Heritage Site), Ho Chi Minh City and places that were parts of ancient Chinese civilisation in Vietnam, among others," Wadhwa told PTI.

Ambassador of Vietnam to India Ton Sinh Thanh also expressed his country's desire to partner with India in the cultural sector and mutually promote shooting of films in the two countries.

"We would like Indian filmmakers to come to our country and explore the place as a shooting destination. We would also like our filmmakers to visit India and shoot movies there... Because, if culture diplomacy works, rest automatically falls into place," he said.
The Vietnamese diplomat also reiterated his country's desire to have a "bust of Ho Chi Minh installed in Delhi".
"I take this opportunity to once again appeal to India to have a statue of the great leader Ho Chi Minh, installed in Delhi, as it has been done in Kolkata," he said.
Thanh said, "Nehru and Ho Chi Minh both represented friendship between the two countries, and this statue would be a monument to that cordial relationship that we have enjoyed over the years."

Wadhwa said that besides cinema and TV production, the countries have tremendous potential to "cooperate in ares of Yoga and Ayurveda, apart from our strategic cooperation in the defence sector.