Discoveries from Vietnam World Cinema

A National Liberation Front film from 1965 featuring a statement by Nguyen Huu Tho addressed to the American public, intercut with illustrative footage.

A documentary on Vũ Dân Tân's infamous art piece, Icarus, and the process of bringing it back to Hanoi.

The movie describes life of Sedang people in highland Tay Nguyen. In here, there was a mixture between new lifestyle with old tradition and customs.

A video movie directed by Tran Ngoc Phong.

Peaceful days directed by Xuan Thanh is about dedicated teachers and graduating students who are full of hopes and dreams for their future. However, it's not easy to be teachers when they have to make their living with low wages. Whether they can pursue their dreams of being teachers before?

Through a documentary style, The Sisters’ Journey explores the daily life of a transgender woman in Vietnam using drugs. The film delves into her fear of stigma, struggles she faces, and the vital role of harm reduction services and healthcare available to her.

A doll and her plush friend ponders what it means to have a heart.

Severely injured, Trang is taken by her Vietcong comrades to hide in a civilian’s house. There, she encounters An, the son of a South Vietnamese police officer. Contrary to his cold and stern appearance, An secretly orders his men to spare Trang’s comrades and sercretly brings her home to nurse her back to health. From that moment, a deep and complex bond begins to grow between the pair.

Date: Monday, August 18, 2036: After the eruption of the Mt. Erasmus super volcano in Holland, most of western Europe has been rendered uninhabitable. I am one of the lucky ones who has been given the opportunity to race the lava to the Pacific ocean on the Daorklis 2, the only train still running to the far east.

This film explores how the conflict with the North affects "South Vietnam's traditional culture, and seeks to explain why the South Vietnamese people still have the will to fight. Included in the film are a funeral procession, family life scenes, fishermen and farmers at work, soldiers moving single file along a dike, and a wedding procession" (US National Archives). A binational production between the United States and the (former) Republic of South Vietnam.

To Quoc Trong Tim: The Concert Film

HE and LOVER return home with a mirror they use for their photography sessions. Through his gestures, HE seduces LOVER into making love. While HE is getting ready in the bathroom, an incident outside happened to LOVER. What follows is HE’s tried to be by the side of LOVER, another of their countless photo shoots, or their final act of intimacy. The sequences merge into one another, breaking the flow of time - memory, the ongoing moment, and the future. Every action is a way to find the answer to the question: "We are so happy when together, what will we do when one of us is absent?"

“This film features the Vietnamese Army, referred to as "sons" of the famous Trung sisters of Vietnamese history” (US National Archives). "The film draws from Vietnamese mythology to allegorize South Vietnam’s struggle with the North, drawing connections between the Trung sisters’ heroic resistance to the Chinese invasion in 40 CE to the conflict the South faced. Many of its sequences reveal the fingerprints of USIA and the American imaginary of Vietnam, moving between sweeping pastoral shots, montages of military preparedness, and scenes of graphic simulated violence upon people of the South—making the film ultimately prowar. However, the documentary renders a complicated, almost paradoxical visual expression of homeland defense. Instead of framing victory as likely and death as something to avoid, the allusions to familiar mythology cosmically situate the South’s resistance as a tragic duty that spans the long history of their nation" (Vukoder and Gharabaghi).

Tuấn Tú / Person-able is a 42-minute video assembled from media captured through Cao's computer and laptop camera over three years. The work documents a personal journey of self-hood. Released in recognition of 2025 International Youth Day, the video foregrounds transgender experience in adolescence.

Into the clouds is a documentary about ethnic minority groups living in peace in northern Vietnam despite major differences in language, culture, and customs.

A typical domestic household model caged in a utopian world when the clock stops working, as they are forced to cohabit defying the stream of time consciousness.

The journey of two sisters in the dense forest near the border where they believe the remains of their father, an unknown martyr, lie somewhere deep underground.

Photographs and videos from the European travels of Vietnamese travelers are set to an upbeat techno track.

Commemorating the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants in the U.K. in 2019, The Melting addresses the unbearable catastrophe of migration, surveillance technologies, and thermal violence.

A young couple from the Ho Chi Minh City middle-class, both architects, are expecting their first child. Having only just reached adulthood, the young man is getting ready to become a father. He begins to become aware of the new responsibilities and the role he will now have to take on. But behind this figure of the new young father, the outline of a young mother is also visible in filigree.

The civil engineering company “Licogi” has hidden the housing designed for its workers and their families behind a wall of containers. Most of the men are away from home, working on major building works across the country. It’s the women who organise life in the community. Since the rainy season is close at hand, new problems of leaking buildings, water drainage and insalubrious homes are coming up once again. Delegations of women regularly visit the firm’s headquarters to call for the buildings to be renovated. But every time, the delegation gets sent home.

Short Vietnamese animated film about a bicycle.

The journey of a group of "not so bright" students studying at an unknown high school, but fate ironically puts the world's last hope in their hands. These are the first minutes of a crazy, emotional journey that the four friends Khoai, Yen, Anh, and Lo would never have expected.

A young girl stops a violent gangster from finding her father hiding in a strange house down the slope.

Can't Take Your Eyes Off is a heartwarming story about two sisters Jack and Thuy Ngan, although they tease each other on the outside, they wholeheartedly protect each other. From a promise to her father, she devoted herself to taking care of her only brother. The two sisters have experienced a beautiful series of time together, full of laughter but also not lacking in tears.

The sensory distortions caused by dissociative disorder make the surgeon girl imprisoned in three different experimental specimen selves in her own mind. In the end, she finds the real chains deep in her heart and frees herself from the illusion.

A plotless but engaging account of life in a Vietnamese village. We see the slaughter of a dog for food, the preparation of a vegetarian meal, and a girl who sells desert, offers her views on life. A film that embodies the horror, hope and cruelty that is part and parcel of everyday life.

Echoed in a memory-laden house are daily conversations between a mother and her two sons, all seemingly asleep. This autobiographical short, in a hybrid form, chronicles a personal memory from director Le Ngoc Duy's adolescence, using set design and reenactment to reconstruct his childhood home and featuring his mother’s voice as part of the cast.

The young girl's worthy reward is not only her own happiness, but also the changes of the people in the village when they witness what happened to Di and her family.

Mo navigates rush hour traffic to dodge an unwanted call. When she meets Vicky by the side of the street with her broken motorbike, a visceral chance encounter unfolds between the two young queer women on the loud streets of Saigon.

Precious. Rare. For Sale. takes a broad sweep at the presentation of nature in Vietnamese moving images from the 1990s. From being an abode for majestic and magical beasts, to serving as a backdrop for war heroics and social realist tragedies, representations of nature have been shaped by Vietnam’s changing socio-political contexts. Reflecting on how filmmakers have portrayed the environment, Bùi questions the ethics of exploiting nature for the camera. While early ethnographic films shot by the French depicted the Vietnamese jungle as an untouched, primitive landscape, today’s images of razed forests and neatly-partitioned land plots reveal how nature has become a commodity for a rising middle-class. Captured on screen by property developers and thrill-seeking vloggers alike, nature’s images shapeshift constantly, feeding into an endless loop of mediated consumption.

Owning a mattress can change the life of someone who owns nothing.

A mother asks a psychic to see her dead daughter. She accepts to pay at all costs, including her blood and a part of her body until she discovers a horrifying truth.

At the age of 13, Hận left his family to work on the River Mekong. He has held a variety of jobs and his life is written like a chronicle that flows with the river.

For centuries, along the Mekong river, the brick kilns in Mang This used to be the symbol of the delta’s economic prosperity. Now, the last brick kilns finally come to an end.

A love story between a ghost and a photographer.

The film is a new perspective describing the story of Dinh Bo Linh who defeated the 12 warlords and reunified the country.

The film uses footage from Trần Đắc’s eponymous feature-length classic produced by the state-owned Vietnam Feature Film Studio. Based on the story of a real-life hero, the original 1973 film was made to provide encouragement to young soldiers serving in the war. Accompanied by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, this recut, with its rapid rhythm and suspenseful images leading to ambiguous intervals imbued with both violence and sensuality, facilitated a multilayered experience that disturbs and detours from the source material’s clear-cut message, content and aesthetics. An exploration of cinematic language, the film simultaneously investigates the narratives generated by collective memory and official history, as it seeks and questions the truth and the possibility to construct it from images. A pioneering found footage work in Vietnam, Song to the Front exemplifies Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s experiments with moving images.

The alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City are narrow and labyrinthine, with walls full of splatters and flyers advertising all kinds of services. Through Đỗ Văn Hoàng’s lens, they become a stage whereby the surrealist drama of idleness unfolds. In between moments of profound uncertainty and darkness are playful dialogues grounded in the experience of traversing the city. Probationary speaks of the existential issue of livelihood from within, without pretense.

Three-Channel Video, Four-Channel Sound, 15 minutes Different versions of the same history – one personal, another depicted by cinema, the third described by the media – are laid on top of each other and collapsed. Mixing footage from 80s and 90s Hong Kong movies, with wire service footage of the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese refugee crisis in Hong Kong from the late 70s until 1997, with an interview with the owner of ‘Paul’s Records’ in Hong Kong, Everyday’s the Seventies continues to explore Nguyễn’s interests in gaps, holes and disconnections in between personal memories/history and other kinds of collective histories. ‘Reading from Below’, Times Art Center Berlin, 2020 State of Motion 2020: Rushes of Time, Singapore 2020 “The sun teaches us that history is not everything”, Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong 2018 Installation, Glasgow Short Film Festival, Glasgow, Scotland 2018 https://wp.me/p2M4CU-ao

In a public restroom, a drifting young man has an erotic encounter with a mysterious stranger. The stranger departs, leaving behind an eye in a shoe. Following the stranger to a desolate place, the young man is met with the excruciating pain that transcends his humanity.

When Van Ngoc Ta originally trained as a lawyer, the Vietnamese family man never imagined that he would be rescuing women.

Describes events that led to the Tet Offensive in the war in Vietnam.

The film shows the dedication ceremony of the Vietnam War Memorial in Westminster, California. Also presented are video clips from the Vietnam war showing Vietnamese and American soldiers, together, fighting the North Vietnamese.

A documentary about the filmmaker's uncle's business.

During the flood season, a boy and his father travel to a rural mountainous village to attend his grandfather’s funeral, each dealing with grief in his own way.

A devout elderly woman’s faith is put to the test when she breaks her leg. She idles at home in a depressed state, fervently believing in the healing power of an online priest.

Every outdoor-game for kids in Saigon (Vietnam) has its season: The marbles season, the figure-toy season, the plastic-coin season... And in one special season, Bi - a 12 year-old boy - has learned one of his biggest lessons in life.

Resisting the westernised reliance on images for creating narratives, telling stories and experiencing the world, How to Improve the World turns to music and sound as a way of perceiving through listening. Originally a 3-channel installation, this aurally centred work reflects on the past, present and future of indigenous cultures of the people in Vietnam’s Central Highlands.

All the birds in the kingdom show off their most beautiful coat of feathers.