Discoveries from Vietnam World Cinema

A film produced by the students of class A3K36, specializing in Physics, at Phan Boi Chau High School for the Gifted, Vinh City, Nghe An Province.

A short documentary exploring the life and marriage of renowned Vietnamese actor Công Lý, as seen through the eyes of his daughter from his first marriage - who always felt abandoned due to an incomplete family.

Struggling to figure out what's going on with her brother's life, the main character( i forgot her name) called a very interesting agency for help. She was given three paths that she could choose as her reality.

A Ho Chi Minh City-based chef charms a gorgeous stewardess with a special tofu dessert, but soon realises that they are incompatible.

Unbalanced is about a civil servant with great integrity who spends most of his time to expose crime in his company, so he can’t meet the demand of his young beautiful wife. He has to face continuously challenging situations. He is accused of serious guilt and they sentence criminals to death, simultaneously his wife has an affair with his best friend. What can he do to prove his innocence?

In 1963, amidst tense relations with Buddhism that may face international backlash, the Ngo family try to find a way around the situation, calling on Luan for missions worth his life. Saigon is heated. A coup may be under preparations. Tran Le Xuan goes on a diplomatic tour of Western nations, determined to clear names.

The tragedy of a feudal family begins to boil when the first wife, unable to have a baby after three years of marriage, is forced by her mother-in-law to serve her husband’s pregnant concubine and gets kicked out of the house afterward.

A Vblogger is on the way of indentify the murderer who killed his parents by reconstructing three shocking murder cases in Vietnam, he found the commonalities between his parents' case and these three cases. At one point, he discovered that all the stories had a clue related to the fetus. And the killer who killed his parents is actually the person who has a very close relationship with him.

In the beautiful Vietnamese bay of Ha Long, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a family faces its imminent separation when the government decides to relocate the inhabitants of the floating village to land.

Four animals try to play their instruments, but are annoyed by each other's noise.

A young couple, whose love blooms from their mutual appreciation of Chingiz Aitmatov's "Tales of the Mountains and the Steppes", struggles with their personal romanticism and faith in each other as the novel becomes subjected to a new era's changing ideas about art.

Bùi Thạc Chuyên travels around rural northern Vietnam to research about classical xẩm singing and its last surviving performer Hà Thị Cầu.

The pandemic virus has left serious consequences on not only the economy, but also the life and spirits of countless people. A quarantine status, established by the government for 60 days in order to protect citizens from the virus, has accidentally put an LGBT couple to the brink of life.

The first Vietnamese animated film, based on a polemical poem from Ho Chi Minh.

This hidden masterpiece, a hallmark of “instant noodle cinema” is a story of love, music, loss, and resilience, featuring Mai, a young woman who loses her sight in a fireworks accident and must navigate the pain of her father’s thirst for revenge, while holding on to the emotional strength that music offers. The film culminates in a whimsical, moving musical finale set in the rain, a moment of joy and transcendence.

Boi leads an isolated life on a mountain with his unwed daughter and his mentally disabled son Maize. Feeling death approach, he becomes obsessed with the continuation of the family line and he resolves to find his son a wife. After numerous intense but failed attempts to buy a woman for Maize, the father is driven to increasingly insane acts...

Nghiêm has taken care of her grandson, Niên for the majority of his thirteen years of life, just as Niên has taken care of Nghiêm, especially when her memory began to fail her. Returning home after his job as a sand digger, Niên discovers Nghiêm is nowhere to be found...again. When his usual searches turn up nothing, he journeys from their rural village to increasingly foreign urban landscapes, guided (and at one point misguided) by the locals he meets along the way and the belief that Nghiêm could appear at any moment, anywhere.

In French colonial Vietnam, a nervous young woman has to satisfy the brutal General’s taste for a traditional dish to save her family from capital punishment.

The story is about an old couple living together in a small house. The romantic and dreamy scenes gradually change when one day the image of his wife begins to change before his eyes.

When Will It End

Two soldiers are tasked with mailing an urgent letter to a battalion surrounded by the enemies’ forces.

A kind-hearted, considerate high school teacher quickly earns the admiration of her new class who sees her as an idol. Together, the students undertake a secret operation to help their beloved teacher sort out her personal life.

Phong grew up in a small town in the center of Vietnam - the youngest of six children. From the time she was young, Phong felt like she was a girl with a mismatched boy's body. Not until she moved to Hanoi to attend university at age 20 did Phong discover that she was not the only one in the world with this predicament. Her dream to 'find herself' by physically changing sex becomes a reality several years later. The movie follows Phong's struggle during these years, with excerpts from an intimate video journal, along with encounters with family, friends and doctors - all of whom must come to terms with Phong determination to become a "complete girl".

My Father's Truck is a part coming-of-age part road film about 10-year-old Mai Vy as she skips school one day to help her father with his passenger truck for hire.

Pregnant after being sexually violated by her stepfather as a punishment for starting a relationship with a professor, Tran Thi Diem Chau runs away from home to live with her friend Thu Hong, a sympathetic nightclub dancer who pays for her abortion and education at a Catholic boarding school. Just when Diem Chau begins to leave behind her painful past, the young woman receives the news of Thu Hong's injuries from an acid attack.

Bao (Chi Bao) and Van (Ha Kieu Anh) have been married for a long time without a child, but Bao’s mother always longs for a grandchild. The test result concludes that Van is infertile. Van asks her staff – Mai (Kim Thu) to have a baby with Bao by a 50-million-dong contract. Mai agrees because she needs money to treat her mom’s disease. It is difficult for Bao to accept this contract due to his love for his wife. After giving birth, Mai can’t give the child to anyone, so she runs away with it and Quang (Cao Minh Dat)- her lover. They meet Bao and Van in a life-threatening situation for the baby.

The title of the film is a nod to what seems to be the condition of our time: never having enough time, neither in the real world nor in the virtual world. The film takes shape when a portrait photographer leaves his subjects by themselves in the studio with the camera for a few minutes. A simple situation yet significant in what it has to say about the act of looking and image making. A city is its people.

Stateless boat women drift through life without a sense of belonging, until one of them dares to dream, breaks the cycle, and begins a quiet fight for survival.

A group of children orphaned during the American bombing raids is sent to a small school in the countryside. Here, the children continue their education, all while learning how to deal with grief and find joy in daily life again.

Nguyen Phuong Linh’s Memory of the Blind Elephant follows the social and geographic transformation of the ex-colonial rubber plantations in Central and Southern Vietnam. The rubber trees, human beings, animals and land all bear the quiet evidence of a complex history.

In the countryside of South Vietnam during the war, a local woman falls in love with a soldier stationed nearby, not knowing he had already married and a confrontation with his wife would soon break off the dalliance. 10 years later, a fateful event brings them all back together to determine once and for all what their future paths would be.

A movie about Võ Thị Sáu, a Vietnamese schoolgirl who fought as a guerrilla against the French occupiers of Vietnam.

Nga, a Vietnamese woman is recorded on camera by her grandson, Vinh for an entire day. She shares with him her past before her memory fades.

An officer from the North penetrated to the South to operate. Exposed and hunted, he fled into the barrel car of a son of the mayor. Accident, car fire, the mayor's son is dead. The father back the wrong man officers with his child, because two youth in this capital the same from the face to the physique. Living next to the mayor, the officials gradually turned by the morality and kindness of him.

Climb up, let’s jump, the fields are green and the houses grey. We’re all small. It feels like the pores of my skin have become gigantic.

A happy-go-lucky watermelon vendor is mistaken for the missing goalie and gets dragged to play in their upcoming match.

A poor carpenter hopes to secure a better life for his daughter by sending her to a college in Hanoi. As the university entrance exams approach, he is dead set on the ultimate mission: ward off anything - or anyone - that will distract the daughter from studying only.

Do Vietnamese people walk differently? This is the absurd question that triggered The Way We Walk, a film made in Saigon, Vietnam, and across its Mekong region. Committed to the commonality of the act of walking, participants subject themselves to interviews whilst being made to walk on a treadmill. They come up with preposterous theories and anecdotes in response to this strange torturing technique, demonstrating their love for the nation as they discuss the implications of regional politics. The Way We Walk’s main character is a treadmill that offers itself as a surface for projection, a machine to tell stories; a Trojan horse to question the policies of censorship.

Struggling to secure a job and make ends meet after her graduation, a young woman slowly gives way to advances made towards her from a well-off company director.

In an old apartment building in Saigon, a 25-year-old man, An, had a close friend come over and stay the night. An had secretly liked that person for a long time, but tomorrow that person was getting married. An knew that this would be the last night that the two of them would be together.

The story about a lonely editor.

Because No One Living Will Listen follows Habiba, a Vietnamese woman whose father was a Moroccan soldier who defected from the French army. The film is based around a speculative letter written by Habiba to her father—who died when she was a baby—as a way to speak to him in his absence. Because No One Living Will Listen centers on Moroccan soldiers who defected from the colonial army and whose repatriation to Morocco was hindered by the outbreak of the Vietnam War. [Overview Courtesy of the New Museum]

One of the best Vietnamese films of 1992 by director Lê Dân and the highlight of actress Việt Trinh's career.

An elderly woman, a boy and a dog. With a cart, they wander around the city collecting boxes and papers, and only return when everyone else is asleep. Produced by Ateliers Varan Vietnam.

Mai is an art student who is invited to act in a movie set in the war. Along with acting and studying, she is in the midst of the complexities of her family background, social life and personal ambitions. Powerful, free-spirited, rebellious, struggling and thoughtful, Forgive Me is like a chorus of young people living in the early 90s in Hanoi.