04-10 Aug

From the Cinematheque members email:

Our summer ‘Vietnam on Film’ series continues with some of the best Vietnamese classic and recent features and documentaries, as well as foreign films made in - or about - Vietnam.

‘Vietnam on Film’ series is open to the public, but Hanoi Cinematheque members may reserve seats as usual.

SCHEDULE (August 4 - 10)

AUGUST

Monday, August 4

19:00 REGRET TO INFORM

21:00 THE QUIET AMERICAN

5 Tuesday

19:00 SILENCE OF THE RICEFIELDS

21:00 17th PARALLEL

6 Wednesday

19:00 MAI’S AMERICA

21:00 THE DESERTED VALLEY

7 Thursday

19:00 PRISONERS IN THE HANOI HILTON

21:00 PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE

8 Friday

19:00 MAI’S AMERICA

21:00 THE REBEL

9 Saturday

14:00 HEARTS AND MINDS

16:00 SILENCE OF THE RICEFIELDS

19:00 INDOCHINE

10 Sunday

16:00 WHEN THE TENTH MONTH COMES

19:00 NOSTALGIA FOR THE COUNTRYSIDE

21:00 THE REBEL

THE FILMS

REGRET TO INFORM

1998 Directed by Barbara Sonneborn 75 minutes

Winner of seven major awards and an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary, REGRET TO INFORM has been hailed by critics for its extraordinary power and beauty.

Venturing to Vietnam twenty years after her husband was killed in a mortar attack, filmmaker Barbara Sonneborn finds a mesmerizing landscape filled with the remnants of war. Getting beyond physical and emotional devastation, she talks to those on all sides of the struggle, discovering a common bond in loss and ultimately understanding.

REGRET TO INFORM is filled with extraordinary archival footage, breathtaking visions of modern-day Vietnam, and heart-wrenching stories from American and Vietnamese women who lost their husbands to war.

THE DESERTED VALLEY

2001 Directed by Pham Nhue Giang 90 minutes English subtitles

This extraordinary Vietnamese feature film won The Silver Lotus (Best Film), Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Actress awards at the 2002 Vietnam Film Festival, and was selected to open the International Forum of New Cinema at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival.

Shot entirely on location in a Hmuong village high in the Hoang Lien Son mountains, THE DESERTED VALLEY is an emotional tale of two schoolteachers from Hanoi who struggle to find meaning in their private and professional lives.

Directed by Ms Pham Nhue Giang, a former assistant to director Dang Nhat Minh, THE DESERTED VALLEY is a rich and entertaining movie ? and one that pushes the boundries of intimacy and sensuality in Vietnamese film.

THE DESERTED VALLEY is like a perfect symphony, with hardly a mistake anywhere. The director not only cares for the main actors, but also the extras - especially for the ethnic school children - so everybody plays their roles naturally.

With THE DESERTED VALLEY we have a proof of the potential of Vietnamese cinema, and we are confident and proud to contribute this film to world cinema.

Ngoc Ngu Long, Saigon Giai Phong

SILENCE OF THE RICE FIELDS (Silence des Rizieres)

France, 2004, Directed by Fleur Albert 90 minutes

French, with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation.

SILENCE OF THE RICE FIELDS casts a new and unusual light on the forgotten French Indochina War with its collective history and individual stories, through the eyes of those who fought against colonialism and for Viet Nam’s independence. Specifically, the film tells the moving story of the French volunteers who fought against their own country’s re-occupation of Vietnam after World War Two.

Mai is the daughter of a Andre, a Frenchman and Thuy Cam, a Vietnamese. She returns to Viet Nam with her mother Thuy Cam to investigate the past. Her father Andre, a member of the French Communist party, was asked by the party (along with his friend Roland) to act as advisors to the Viet Minh in its struggle against France in the early 1950s. Although Andre refused to be interviewed, many of his comrades, including the amazing Mai Van Hien, Roland, and Mai’s mother, are eloquent witnesses in this beautiful meditative film.

The film questions the intimate consequences of history from the point of view a family, with its mythology, sacrifice and its divisions. The rhythm, pacing, silence and music add to the film’s calm, seductive tone. An unforgettable documentary.

HEARTS AND MINDS

U.S.A., 1974 Directed by Peter Davis 112 minutes

English, with Vietnamese audio option

1974 Academy Award, Best Documentary

Peter Davis’ 1974 documentary HEARTS AND MINDS, is an important film for a number of reasons. It’s a stark, unflinching work that examines America’s involvement in the Vietnam War and won an Academy Award for best documentary at the 1974 Oscars. Its anti-war stance offended Oscar co-hosts Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra, who read a hastily written statement saying, We are not responsible for any political references made on the program, and we are sorry that they had to take place this evening. This enraged Shirley MacLaine, and Francis Ford Coppola, who won three awards that evening for The Godfather Part II, defended it, stating the Academy knew it was an anti-war film and by voting for it, they were sanctioning its message.

The film’s thrust, that the US Government lied to its people in order to proceed with the war in Indochina, is one that divided people, and still has the power to shock even today. It has an eerie parallel with the current conflict in Iraq, which only the most muddleheaded can fail to notice.

HEARTS AND MINDS eschews the traditional voice-over, using instead the skilled editing of Lynnzee Klingman to juxtapose contradictory talking heads and interviews with politicians, soldiers, Vietnamese refugees, parents of troops killed in Vietnam and paraplegics created by the war. Peter Davis and his crew went to Vietnam and came back with some startling footage of American soldiers setting fire to the homes of terrified locals and sleeping with Vietnamese hookers, and the terrible results of indiscriminate bombing. This was woven into the fabric of the documentary together with some of the most disturbing images from the war, such as the young Vietnamese girl Kim Phuc running down a road following a napalm attack with her skin hanging off and South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner with a bullet to the head.

Davis had already made an enemy of the US Government with his previous CBS film THE SELLING OF THE PENTAGON (1971) which tackled the issue of the Pentagon’s public relations and propaganda campaign during the Cold War, and was the subject of a congressional investigation. A year or so later, Davis left CBS and teamed up with producer Bert Schneider in order to tell the kind of stories he felt compelled to explore, and HEARTS AND MINDS was one of the first fruits of that partnership.

Although Davis felt that the TV networks had covered the Vietnam War adequately, there were a number of questions that had never been addressed: Why did the US go to Vietnam in the first place? What did the US do to Vietnam and the Vietnamese People? And finally, what effect did the war have on the US? Each of those questions is tackled as the documentary progresses, but not necessarily answered.

Perhaps the most crucial message that the film conveys is one of lessons forgotten or ignored. For the Cold War fear of Communism read the 21st century fear of radical Islam. Davis was sent to Iraq to cover the war there for liberal American magazine The Nation and found what he called d�j� vu: the same lack of understanding about the people, the language, the culture and beliefs (General William Westmoreland declares on camera, The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is cheap in the Orient.); the same lack of coherent reasoning for going to war, the same corporate interests hovering over the wounded body of the country (witness the scenes with the Coca Cola bottling plant in Saigon) and the same government lies and subterfuge.

Iraq is often described as George Bush’s Vietnam, but to fully understand what that means, you need to watch HEARTS AND MINDS. Whatever your political viewpoint, Peter Davis’ documentary is a powerful and modern indictment of contemporary war. It’s a gripping and important historical document that is required viewing for everyone with an interest in current affairs.

MAI’S AMERICA

2002 Directed by Marlo Poras 71 minutes

English, with Vietnamese audio option

MAI’S AMERICA is a personal journey that defies all expectations. Mai, a smart, vivacious, and resilient Vietnamese teenager, travels to America for her senior year of high school, shouldering her family’s high expectations and her own visions of western-style success. Yet, nothing in Mai’s wildest imagination could prepare her for what she finds in rural Mississippi, where encounters with white Pentecostal and black Baptist host-families, a local transvestite, and South Vietnamese immigrants challenge her long-held ideas about America, the concept of freedom, her identity and even her homeland of Vietnam.

Relatively privileged in Hanoi, Mai finds herself on a lower rung of the American economic ladder when she lands in Meridian, Mississippi. Her host family, composed of self-described rednecks, proves a challenge to her usually outgoing and upbeat personality. Plagued by unemployment and depression, the family shows little curiosity in their Vietnamese guest. At school, she finds it equally difficult at first to form real bonds.

But Mai is nothing if not persistent. She soon wins the heart of her host grandmother, who expresses an interest in her Vietnamese culture, and finds a worthy mentor in her high school history teacher.

THE 17th PARALLEL

Netherlands, Vietnam 1968 Directed by Joris Ivens 115 minutes

French and Vietnamese, with English audio option

Joris Iven’s THE 17th PARALLEL: THE PEOPLE’S WAR was a landmark in conveying the wartime conditions and indomitable spirit of the North Vietnamese citizenry, pairing interviews with victims who fled American bombing in the south with ongoing cultural activities conducted in underground bunkers around Hanoi. It also contains a frequently quoted scene of a downed American pilot being led through a mob of angry villagers.

Ivens (November 18, 1898 - June 28, 1989) was a Dutch documentary filmmaker and devout communist. He is generally respected as one of the foremost documentarists of the twentieth century. Born into a wealthy family, Ivens went to work in his father’s photo supply shop and from there developed an interest in film. From 1936 to 1945 Ivens lived in the United States and made anti-fascist and other propaganda films (including the propaganda piece for the Spanish loyalists THE SPANISH EARTH, narrated by Ernest Hemingway). With the rise of McCarthyism, Ivens left the United States. In 1946, commissioned to make a Dutch film about Indonesian independence, Ivens resigned out of protest of what he considered ongoing imperialism. For about a decade Ivens lived in Eastern Europe, working for several studio’s there. His position concerning Indonesia and his taking sides for the Eastern Block in the Cold War annoyed the Dutch government. Over a period of many years, he was obliged to renew his passport every four months. From 1965 to 1970 he filmed life in North Vietnam during the war. Joris Ivens was awarded Lenin Peace Prize for the year 1967, and was ?rehabilitated and knighted by the Dutch government in 1989. He died on June 28 that same year.

PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE

Australia, 1981 Directed by David Bradbury 60 minutes

English, with Vietnamese audio option

One man, Wilfred Burchett, alerted Western public opinion to the nature of this war and the struggle of the Vietnamese people.

— Bertrand Russell

A stunning documentary on the life and work of controversial Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett.

For most of his working life, Burchett chose to report from the other side. His unorthodox views and activities caused him to be labelled a traitor by many, and to be barred from returning to his native Australia. Burchett was the first Western journalist to report on the devastating after effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. During the Vietnam war he lived among the Viet Cong, and was a friend and admirer of Ho Chi Minh.

I write this as a warning to the world.

So began the story filed at Hiroshima in August 1945 by Wilfred Burchett, the first Western journalist to witness the devastation of nuclear war. While 250 journalists were reporting on the Japanese surrender, Burchett alone realized the real story was in that doomed city, officially off limits to outsiders. His article in the Daily Express on September 5, 1945, entitled The Atomic Plague, was the first public report to mention the effects of radiation and nuclear fallout.

World War ll was the last war that Australian Wilfred Burchett was to report from his countrymen’s side. It was his firm conviction that the West was wrong in Korea, and wrong later in Vietnam, and the stories he filed outraged the West.

His long-standing friendship with Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam, enabled him to live among the Vietcong. PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE includes footage from the Vietnamese archives rarely seen in the West.

Was Burchett a traitor as his detractors claim? There are no easy answers. Burchett insists he was exercising his journalistic responsibility in reporting the truth. The West, he felt, was getting only a distorted view of the conflict. His critics, however, felt he was abetting the enemy and even brainwashing allied prisoners. The Australian Government denied him a passport for 17 years, forcing him to live in exile (Burchett’s two sons were born in Hanoi). In tracing Burchett’s life and the wars he covered, PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE raises many issues of vital importance.

Can a democracy tolerate opinions it considers subversive to its national interest? How far can freedom of the press be extended in wartime?

A gripping part of the film occurs when filmmaker Bradbury was ambushed with Burchett by Cambodian guerillas on a mountain road. In the tradition of photojournalism, Bradbury’s camera kept rolling, recording the bloody scene. Burchett escaped injury but could not escape the irony that confronted him in Cambodia. The Pol Pot regime, which he had earlier championed, had turned Cambodia into a killing ground worse than Hiroshima.

PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE has received the following awards:

- Best Film, Sydney Film Festival, 1981

- Chris Statuette, Columbus Film Festival, 1981

- Edinburgh International Film Festival, 1981

- Golden Gate Award, San Francisco Film Festival, 1981

- Blue Ribbon, American Film Festival, 1981

- Second Place, Baltimore International Film Festival, 1981

- Berlin Film Festival, 1981

Wilfred Burchett’s son George will join us for the first presentation of PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE in Vietnam.

INDOCHINE

1992 Directed by Regis Wargnier 156 minutes English subtitles

Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, 1992, INDOCHINE is an intimate epic - a tale of passion and revolution in colonial Vietnam.

The first six weeks of filming were done in Vietnam, including the opening funeral procession near Hanoi, the slave market/bridge scenes at Halong Bay, and the Vietnamese marriage ceremony at The Imperial Palace in Hue.

Catherine Deneuve stars as Eliane Devries, the seemingly repressed owner of a prosperous rubber plantation in French Indochina. When her adopted Indochinese daughter innocently falls in love with Elaine’s secret lover, the scandal threatens to destroy their entire family. Set against the violence of the bloody Communist uprising, INDOCHINE is an historically accurate, emotionally wrenching epic of love and war.

INDOCHINE sprawls and enthralls. It has the breadth and intelligence of David Lean epics. If you were to choose a film to express the agony and ambiguity of Vietnam in this century, it should be INDOCHINE

–Richard Corliss, TIME MAGAZINE

THE REBEL

2007 Directed by Charlie Nguyen 103 minutes

English subtitles

Reported to be the most expensive Vietnamese feature ever produced, THE REBEL is a cooperative production between Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American filmmakers and actors.

Colonial Vietnam in 1922. The long-standing French occupation of the country has inflamed anti-French sentiments, triggering guerilla forces to rise up against the foreign invaders. In response, the French employ elite units of Vietnamese agents to track down and destroy these rebels.

The story follows Cuong, an undercover agent of the French. Tired of bloodshed, Cuong helps Thuy escape French forces in order to save her rebel village. Plagued by patriotic obligations, Cuong is unsure of where his loyalty lies when he is confronted with the brutal reality of French rule and his own humanity reflected in Thuy’s eyes.

Review by Andrew James at Toronto Film Festival:

When it comes to straight up martial arts films, they generally aren’t my thing. But when a film is released touting itself as the most expensive film ever from Vietnam, it must be worth a look-see. Couple that with producer/writer/star Johny Nguyen in the lead and you’ve got a picture that is nearly irresistible.

Nguyen plays Le, a young secret service agent working with the French in their occupation of Vietnam during the 1920s. He and his partner, Sy, are responsible for the safety of various French officials. Of course he is seen as a traitor to his people by many. With this occupation, a small rebel force has grown in strength and is determined to assassinate various leaders of The French occupying government. During an assassination attempt, Le kills a young boy and begins to have second thoughts about loyalty. When the torture of a suspect goes beyond boundaries, Le chooses to help the girl escape and becomes part of the rebel faction, becoming almost immediate enemies with his ex-partner, Sy.

Of course the stand out in this movie are the fight scenes. The martial arts sequences are extremely well choreographed and some of the take down moves and high kicking action sequences are almost breathless. This should be really no surprise as Johny Nguyen is no stranger to the martial arts motion pictures. He’s fought with both Jet Li and Tony Jaa while also doing stuntwork in several major, Hollywood motion pictures such as Jarhead, Serenity and Collateral. Though his face may not be recognizable, audiences know him best as the guy in the Spiderman costume in Sam Raimi’s first two movies.

But this is far from being just another martial arts movie. With the nice cinematography and interesting, historical setting, it’s almost worthy of being called a sweeping epic. The storyline is also worthy of a standard, Hollywood production. With rebels fighting imposing odds and a tyrannical, invading nation, it’s easy to pick sides; and with the historical element added, you know that there will be a few scenes that are difficult to watch for their emotional impact and their brutality.

My major enjoyment from the film came from the tangled storyline. Besides sort of an action/adventure and historical type of film, it also employs somewhat of a mystery. There are traitors and moles within each faction and the audience is kept guessing about who they might be. In fact, I was never quite sure where Le’s loyalties lied throughout much of the picture. This is the type of film where there might be a twist coming at any moment. I very much enjoyed that aspect to the movie.

The acting and dialogue throughout is surprisingly well played. I say surprising because for basically a stuntman to come forth and put together a story like this with strong, deep characters and heve them pull off their lines without cheese or feeling forced really says something about the film maker. This is not just some muscle bound henchman in the movie industry. He shows his grits as also a smart screenwriter with acting and casting talent as well.

So The Rebel is more than worth seeing when available. Not so much as an action movie with a plot than it is a dramatic, well-acted story with amazingly choreographed fight scenes within to just give it that extra push over the top. Look for great things in the future from Nguyen as The Rebel is certainly a great foundation for him and his director brother (Charlie Nguyen) to start with.

WHEN THE TENTH MONTH COMES

1984 Directed by Dang Nhat Minh 90 minutes

English subtitles

A haunting portrait of one woman’s struggle with loss and personal sacrifice during the war, WHEN THE TENTH MONTH COMES is considered by many local and international critics to be the greatest Vietnamese movie ever made.

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. The title of the movie refers to the month in which the Day of Forgiveness occurs; a time when it is said that departed souls may visit loved ones still living.

The film resonates beautifully with the traditional Vietnamese precepts of duty and sacrifice, combined with aesthetic influences from centuries of tradional poetry, literature and theatre.

Although this was the first post-war Vietnamese movie to be shown at foreign film festivals (winning several awards), the film has seldom been shown in Vietnam since it was produced in 1984. The movie was recently restored, with English subtitles, and we will be screening this brand new copy.

NOSTALGIA FOR THE COUNTRYSIDE

1987 Directed by Dang Nhat Minh 116 minutes

English subtitles

Powerful and poetic, NOSTALGIA FOR THE COUNTRYSIDE explores the tensions and traumas of everyday life in a rural northern 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.

Somewhat controversial at the time of its release, NOSTALGIA FOR THE COUNTRYSIDE has been acclaimed by international critics as a masterpiece, due largely to the sensitive and compassionate storytelling of director Dang Nhat Minh.

HANOI CINEMATHEQUE

Hanoi’s unique ‘art-house cinema’, is a members-only film society.

Memberships are available at the box office for only 100,000VND per year.

Members receive regular emails with detailed schedules and reviews of the films.

Tickets to the films are by donation.

HANOI CINEMATHEQUE 22A Hai Ba Trung Street (at the end of the alley leading to Artist’s Hotel) RESERVATIONS: Tel: 936 2648 (14:00 - 20:00) Fax: 936 2649 Email: info2@hanoicinema.org CAFE CINEMATHEQUE from 17:00 weekdays and from 13:30 weekends.