Vietnamese

In the final days of the war, a beautiful young widow, Duyen, faces a daily struggle to take care of her young son and ailing father-in-law, all the while hiding from them the fact that her husband has recently been killed in battle. Keeping her secret burden to herself, she is befriended by the village schoolmaster, Zhang, who agrees to fabricate letters from her dead husband in order to spare her family sorrow. As their friendship deepens, Duyen and Zhang find themselves drawn closer to intimacy – a dangerous relationship if Duyen if to maintain her charade.Read More »

In 19th century rural Vietnam, 14-year-old May becomes the third wife of wealthy landowner Hung. Soon she learns that she can only gain status by asserting herself as a woman who can give birth to a male child. May’s hope to change her status turns into a real and tantalizing possibility when she gets pregnant. Faced with forbidden love and its devastating consequences, May finally comes to an understanding of the brutal truth: the options available to her are few and far between.Read More »

Synopsis
One of the myths surrounding the creation of Vietnam involves a fight between two dragons whose intertwined bodies fell into the South China Sea and formed Vietnam’s curving S-shaped coastline. Influential feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s lyrical film essay commemorating the 40th anniversary of the end of the war draws inspiration from ancient legend and from water as a force evoked in every aspect of Vietnamese culture. Read More »

In the curious story of this magic-realistic film, the customs of ethnic mountain peoples in Vietnam are linked to the idiosyncrasies of modern art. There are three protagonists, who live on a lonely mountain. They are the old father and his two children: his beautiful, nubile daughter and a mentally handicapped son. Tradition dictates that the son first has to marry in order to ensure the male family line is continued. For that, young men go to the annual marriage market, but the undesirable son returns every year without a bride. The old man is determined that his son will father a child before he dies and takes unusual measures to ensure this.

The film was banned in its own country, primarily because of the sexual themes, but also possibly because of its unruly form.Read More »

Set in a breath-taking primitive landscape in the mountainous provinces of Vietnam, the film tells the story of a Hmong tribe girl named Pao. She was raised by her stepmother, for her real mother left her when she was little. One day, her stepmother dies in an accident, and she begins to track down her birth mother. But her journey turns out to disclose an unsealed sentimental drama of the family in the past.Read More »

One of the most acclaimed Vietnamese films of the 1980s, The Traveling Circus won numerous international awards, including Grand Prix at Fribourg Third world Film Festival, Audience Award at Uppsala (Sweden) International Film Festival and First Prize at Madrid Women’s Film Festival. With obvious influences from Bergman, DeSica and Fellini, director Viet Linh tells the bittersweet story of a small traveling circus from Hanoi stopping in an impoverished ethnic minority village in Vietnam’s central highlands. Through the eyes of a village youngster, we witness the magic of the circus, and the naïve hope that illusion can be transformed into reality. The Traveling Circus is an extremely realistic, sensitive and moving film, that is rarely shown either in Vietnam or abroad.Read More »

Powerful and poetic, Nostalgia for the Countryside explores the tensions and traumas of everyday life in a rural Vietnamese village. The arrival from abroad of Quyen, who fled the village as a small girl, coincides with the sexual awakening of 17-year-old Nham, through whose eyes the story unfolds. While picturesque on the surface, the countryside that Quyen dreamed about turns out to be a landscape of poverty, passion and tragedy – though not without pockets of warmth and humor.Read More »

Quote:
Eating, sleeping, and staying clean…Life’s most basic concerns. Yet they take on a transcendent quality in this visually delicious film, known in French as L’odeur de la Papaye Verte, and in Vietnamese as Mui Du Du Xanh. With only the barest minimum of dialogue, The Scent of Green Papaya tells the 1940’s story of a young orphan girl named Mui, who goes to work as a domestic servant in the troubled household of a Saigon merchant family. Under the mentorship of the family’s elderly housekeeper, Mui is a quick study in becoming adept at her daily duties, which she performs with diligence and grace. Early on, she learns that the family has lost a daughter named Tó, who would have been just about Mui’s age, and over time, the mother’s affection for her grows, and Mui becomes like a daughter herself.Read More »

A “cyclo” is a bicycle-drawn taxi similar to a rickshaw, and, in this story, the nickname of an 18-year-old boy trying to scrape together a living in the desperate poverty of Ho Chi Mihn City. Cyclo lives with his grandfather (Le Kinh Huy) and two sisters (Tran Nu Yen-Khe and Pham Ngoc Lieu), and drives his taxi for a bitter woman (Nhu Quynh Nguyen) who devotes most of her time to her mentally unstable son (Bjuhoang Huy). When the pedal-cab is stolen, Cyclo is forced into a life of crime to repay the debt and falls in with a group of petty thugs led by a self-styled poet (Tony Leung Chiu Wai). What Cyclo doesn’t know at first is that the poet is also a pimp, and he’s been using his romantic wiles to lure Cyclo’s older sister into a career as a prostitute. Cyclo was directed by Tran Anh Hung, whose breakthrough film was the acclaimed drama The Scent of Green Papaya.

— Mark Deming, All Movie GuideRead More »