Special job – sex movie censors Sitting in front of a screen, watching the naked scene of a man and a woman, Mr. Huan, 50, used an earphone and took notes in a notebook. Each day, this man has to watch dozens of movies with such scenes.   The desk of Mr. Huan. Going to the office in the morning like other office workers, but instead of sitting at the desk to do paperwork, Huan and his colleagues at the import-export cultural product inspection division of the HCM City Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism start their working day buy wearing glasses and then watch the films that are said to be "problematic." Placing a cup of tea on the table, the 50-year-old man, who is a senior film censor, turns the 14 inch computer screen in the corner. Carefully using a sheet of cardboard to cover the edge of the screen so that passersby cannot see the screen, Huan put a dish labeled with naked girls on the DVD drive. After a few minutes of startup, the computer screen displayed a pair of naked man and woman. Huan wears ear phones and his eyes focused on the movie and his hand moved the mouse. The film is divided into different sections. To check the contents, he forwards the movie and sometimes slows down the speed and takes notes in a notebook. Just like that, he watches DVDs one by one. "That is our job. At the beginning, I was very embarrassed but gradually I have been used to with it. Now it is purely the work. Nobody laughs or blushes with shame when watching bizarre scenes in black film," Huan said. All porno movies that Huan and his colleagues have to check and assess are those collected by cultural inspectors from disk recording and copying in HCM City. The task of Huan and his group is watching these films, classify the content to help the authorities determine the level of violation. This group has five people, four men and one woman. As this is a sensitive task, the female staff is assigned to assess music DVDs and the four men check porno films. As a colleague of Huan for over 10 years, Mr. Thanh said it is normal to have "physiological response of the body" when watching porno films but once they consider this is their job, “things become normal." “Some people often joke that doing this job we will be fed up with sexual relations with our wives but luckily, we have been still alright for a dozen years," he said and turned to smile at his colleagues. According to Thanh, pornographic movies are divided into two levels: porno and adult movies. With porno films, the content is only sex while adult movies have storylines and several sexual scenes. It is more difficult to censor the later. "It is easy to determine porno movies because from start to the end they have just sex scenes. For adult movies, we have to watch carefully because some movies have only several sex scenes but they are very sensitive. Also, we have to analyze them together in order to avoid mistaken conclusions between the movie with sex scenes but have sexual education or humanity content," Thanh said. This job is thought to be leisure but it is actually a hard job since the number of illegal disks seized by inspectors and the police is huge. "Sometimes the police seized several hundred thousands of DVDs and we were asked to check them as soon as possible. Each of us had to watch hundreds of disks every week. Some days we were so tired and suffered from sore eyes and headache," Mr. Hung, who has over 15 years of experience in this profession. Commenting on the situation of buying and selling black movies on the market today, film censors said that thanks to the strict control of the authorities, the number of porn movies has reduced but the number of adult films is on the rise. "This is the kind of films of highly harm influence because many stories in the films seriously violating social ethics. Therefore the censors like us have to be more careful to support the police to filter such movies so that they cannot exist in the market," a censor said. Under the provisions of the Criminal Code of Vietnam, the act of production and circulation of porn products can be sentenced up to 15 years in prison and fined tens of millions dong. T. Van, VietNamNet Bridge