From the Cinematheque members email:
- 25-31 Aug - 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 Cinémathèque members may reserve seats as usual

Hanoi Cinematheque
25-31 Aug 2008

SCHEDULE (August 25 - 31)

AUGUST

25 Monday
19:00 REGRET TO INFORM
21:00 HEARTS AND MINDS

26 Tuesday
19:00 SILENCE OF THE RICEFIELDS
21:00 17th PARALLEL

27 Wednesday
19:00 MAI’S AMERICA
21:00 THE DESERTED VALLEY

28 Thursday
19:00 PRISONERS IN THE HANOI HILTON
21:00 PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE

29 Friday
19:00 A DREAM IN HANOI
21:00 THE REBEL

30 Saturday
14:00 HEARTS AND MINDS
16:00 SILENCE OF THE RICEFIELDS
19:00 Members’ Screening (to be announced)
21:00 Members’ Screening (to be announced)

31 Sunday
16:00 WHEN THE TENTH MONTH COMES
19:00 NOSTALGIA FOR THE COUNTRYSIDE
21:00 CASUALTIES OF WAR

THE FILMS

THE QUIET AMERICAN
1958 Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz 122 minutes
English with Vietnamese audio option

Not the recent re-make with Michael Caine, this is the original Hollywood version of Graham Greene’s famous novel.

In 1952, Saigon is caught between the corrupt colonial French and American powers and a Communist uprising. An idealistic young American (Audie Murphy) champions a shadowy “Third Force”, but cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler (Michael Redgrave) is concerned only with the American’s interest in his mistress Phuong. When jealousy forces Fowler to take sides at last, the personal and political consequences are devastating.

Apart from the revised ending (renounced by Greene, but politically correct at the time the movie was made) this version is essentially closer to the novel than the newer version – and is certainly worth consideration as a successful literary adaptation. Most of the exteriors were filmed in Saigon in 1957; interiors were filmed at an Italian film studio.

CASUALTIES OF WAR
U.S.A., 1989 Directed by Brian De Palma 119 minutes
English with Vietnamese audio option

Based on true events during the Vietnam War, and with stunning performances by Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn, this is one of the most punishing, morally complex movies about men at war ever made. It is a film of great emotional power and great seriousness in which all of director Brian De Palma’s talents and interests are in balance. Highly recommended.

From review by Don Willmott, Filmcritic.com:

“Vietnam War movies are always tough to watch, especially for those of us who go through life burdened with liberal guilt. But of all the Vietnam movies out there, none is more painful to watch — and paradoxically more beautifully shot — than CASUALTIES OF WAR, in which all of director Brian De Palma’s prodigious talents are in full effect.”

From Review by Hal Hinson, Washington Post:

“What De Palma gives us, essentially, is the anatomy of an atrocity. He shows us in detail the unraveling of the moral fabric, how the descent into barbarism is a journey of steps. The film’s script was written by the playwright David Rabe, but its origins are in an actual incident, reported first in 1969 in the New Yorker by Daniel Lang, in which a five-soldier squad on a long-range reconnaissance mission kidnapped a South Vietnamese girl and took her miles away from her village, where four of the five men raped, brutalized and eventually murdered her.

In the film the participants are heartland-bred American boys whose most remarkable quality is their averageness. Their leader is a sergeant named Meserve (Sean Penn), a short-timer who wants simply to live through the last few weeks of his stint and head back to the world. Chewing up his words in a thick Jersey accent, Meserve is tough in the way that comic-book soldiers are tough; he’s all cigar butts and whorehouse bluster. In the field, though, he knows what’s what, and the other men look up to him as a model of survival. They hang on his every word, even imitate his bantam strut, because they believe their lives depend on it.

The soldier with the most to learn is a fresh-faced kid named Eriksson (Michael J. Fox), who’s been in the jungle for only three weeks and still can’t quite get it into his head that he’s signed up for a war and not a Boy Scout Camporee. Early on, this bland kid’s sunny naivete provides us with a couple of endearing comic moments, especially when he risks taking a potentially lethal gift from a villager rather than act “rude.” And in another scene, when he’s helping an old man plow a rice paddy, his openness seems almost gallant, and we want to accept his vision of the world — even the world at war — as benign and forgiving.

CASUALTIES OF WAR is the kind of culminating work that brings the rest of an artist’s career into razor-sharp focus. De Palma has created a movie that is both intensely personal and at the same time transcends the limitations of the personal. It is great in the ways that the best De Palma films have been great, but with something more — something like soul.”

REGRET TO INFORM
1998 Directed by Barbara Sonneborn 75 minutes
English with Vietnamese audio option

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.

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 “déjà 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.

PRISONERS IN THE HANOI-HILTON
1992 Directed by Daniel Roussel 52 minutes
French and Vietnamese with English translation

In 1992, the director Daniel Roussel had access to the unseen cinematographic archives of the Vietnamese army. These archives were the starting point of the documentary PRISONERS IN THE HANOI-HILTON. American pilots are seen being captured then wandering in a prison. Twenty years later, Roussel located two of these pilots in U.S.A, and brought the Vietnamese film footage to them. As the U.S. veterans view themselves for the first time in the Hanoi-Hilton, they recollect their imprisonment. Alongside their version, a Vietnamese colonel in charge of interrogation during the war describes the rules of detention.

This documentary was selected in 1992 and 1993 for the International Festival of audiovisual programs, in Cannes, France.

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

A DREAM IN HANOI
2002 Directed by Tom Weidlinger 106 minutes
English and Vietnamese with English subtitles

Four years ago, Dr Lorelle Browning - a professor at Pacific University in Portland, Oregon - brought an American theatre company to Hanoi to stage a bi-lingual, bi-cultural production of Shakespeare’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, together with actors and a director from the National Theatre of Vietnam.

The entire project was the subject of a fascinating and entertaining full-length documentary film, produced by San Francisco filmmaker Tom Weidlinger, entitled A DREAM IN HANOI.

“On paper, it seemed like an ideal arrangement: Take a theater company from Portland, Ore., send it to Hanoi in the fall of 2000 and have it collaborate with a renowned Vietnamese theater company on one of Shakespeare’s most illuminating plays, “A Midsummmer Night’s Dream.”

The result, as captured by documentarian Tom Weidlinger, was anything but smooth. In “A Dream in Hanoi,” egos clash, cultural misunderstandings are common, and last-minute obstacles from the Vietnamese government threaten to derail a performance that had started out with such high hope.

American Shakespeare scholar Lorelle Browning, who spent five years arranging the co-production, is reduced to tears by the artistic confrontations that emerge in Hanoi, but there are epiphanies, too. Walking and motorbiking around Vietnam’s capital reveals a culture that is rich in sounds, sights and smells. A Vietnamese actress goes against her country’s tradition and loves displaying more affection on stage.

Weidlinger was in the right place at the right time. Who could have predicted that then-President Clinton would send a representative to rehearsals to gauge whether he should attend opening night? The visit adds a new layer of tension to the production — a tension that never lets up until the end of “A Dream in Hanoi.” Narrated by F. Murray Abraham, this documentary is a treat to behold.

Jonathan Curiel, San Francisco Chronicle

MAI’S AMERICA
2002 Directed by Marlo Poras 71 minutes
English only

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 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

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.

THE REBEL
2007 Directed by Charlie Nguyen 103 minutes
Vietnamese with 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.”

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.

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.