From the Cinematheque members email:
Our summer Vietnam on Film series concludes at the end of next week.
Vietnam on Film is open to the public, but Hanoi Cinematheque members may reserve seats as usual.

SCHEDULE (September 8 - 14)

SEPTEMBER

8    Monday
19:00    Vietnamese Documentaries: Program 1
21:00    Vietnamese Documentaries: Program 2

9    Tuesday
19:00    SILENCE OF THE RICE FIELDS
21:00    17th PARALLEL

10    Wednesday
19:00    Vietnamese Documentaries: Program 3
21:00    THE DESERTED VALLEY

11    Thursday
19:00    PRISONERS IN THE HANOI HILTON
21:00    Member’s Screening. To be announced

12    Friday
19:00   CASUALTIES OF WAR
21:00    THE REBEL

13    Saturday
16:00    LIVING IN FEAR
18:00    THE LOVER
20:30    INDOCHINE

14    Sunday
16:00    LIVING IN FEAR
18:00    THE LOVER
20:30    INDOCHINE

THE FILMS

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.”

VIETNAMESE DOCUMENTARIES Program 1:

STORY FROM THE CORNER OF A PARK
1996     Directed by Tran Van Thuy       30 minutes
English subtitles

This moving documentary chronicles the life of a Vietnamese couple whose children were born with crippling deformities as a result of the chemical toxins used on Vietnam soldiers during the war. But the film is anything but sad.  Each family member has developed a skill that has overcome their disabilities - in most interesting and entertaining ways.

LUA’S STORY
2005          30 minutes
English subtitles

This is a quasi-documentary retracing the events in the life of Lua who became HIVpositive after her fisherman husband brought home the disease.  Lua tells of descent into prostitution and subsequent time in a rehabilitation center.  She regains her self  esteem and begins to speak about her illness publicly, prompting other women whose situation is similar to hers, to take action.  The newly empowered women come up with an unusual solution.

WHY IS THERE NO MOON IN THE DAYTIME?
2006    Directed by Bui Kim Quy    12 minutes
English subtitles

A happy couple await the outcome of a pregnancy test, but instead, the wife is told she is HIV positive.  Devastated, they return to their village where the news of her infection results in her being ostracized not just by her family, but the entire village.

In early 2004 the Medical Committee Netherlands Vietnam (MCNV) invited screenwriter and director Bui Kim Quy and director Luong Dinh Dung to make this short fiction film to provoke discussion on the treatment of people with HIV in Vietnam. While the lives of some women are now improving because of the increasing availability of care and treatment, this movie is a powerful reminder of the fates of those still excluded.

SWEET HOME (Student project)
2007   Directed by Phan Huynh Trang   18 minutes
English subtitles

This outstanding student project depicts the lives of a married couple and their latch key son who is left to his own devices most of the time.  Both mother and father drive “xe om” and work around the clock to eke out a living.  They communicate with their son via blackboard messages. With the help of kindly neighbors, he prepares his own meals and gets to school.  The family’s tiny world consists mainly of a bed where all three eat, sleep and the boy does his homework.  Using a hand held camera and an unobstrusive technique Cassavetes would approve of, Phan Huynh Trang has made a breakthrough with this student project.  Whether she continues in documentary film or makes feature films, she has transformed the genre with this impressive work.

VIETNAMESE DOCUMENTARIES Program 2:

SUBURBS OF HANOI (Documentary Film Studio)
Directed by Lai Van Sinh
English subtitles

Most of the food and crafts for sale on the streets and in the small shops of Hanoi are produced in villages surrounding the capital. This colorful documentary explores these small communities of craftsmen.

LETTER FROM THE WAVES (Documentary Film Studio)
Directed by Vuong Khanh Luong
English subtitles

Visitors to Ha Long Bay are enchanted by the magical scenery and the quaint fishing villages that dot the landscape. In this short documentary we learn of realities of these isolated communities where illiteracy is common. Two young teachers from the mainland establish a classroom to teach the basics.  A student must swim to the floating classroom because he has no other means to get there.  This is a look behind the idyllic scene into the poverty and harshness of the lives of fishing villages set in a landscape developed for tourism.

A STEEP CLIMB (Documentary Film Studio)
Directed by Le Hong Chuong
English subtitles

A young teacher treks over rice fields to reach her school room.  In this short compelling film, she tells of her upbringing in a leper colony and how this impelled her to become a teacher.  Unusually frank, the documentary is personal, warm and has a point of view, rare in Vietnamese documentaries.

VIETNAMESE DOCUMENTARIES: Program 3
(3 recent documentaries)

DREAMING OF BEING A WORKER
2007    Directed by Tran Phuong Thao    50 minutes
English subtitles

In the new “free trade,” “market economy” of Vietnam, thousands of young Vietnamese girls now work in foreign-owned factories for approx $2. Per day - hardly a living wage. This brave documentary gives us an intimate look at the lives of several of these working girls.

LOOKING FOR LOVE
2007   Directed by Keith Halstead         28 minutes
English subtitles

This fascinating documentary explores the traditional “Love Market” of the northern highland village of Khau Vai. One weekend every year, Hmong teenagers assemble from various rural villages for a weekend of courtship. A colourful affair, with plenty of food, drink and music. Remarkably, the rituals of courtship shown here have remained intact for hundreds of years.

GREEN MEADOW
2007    Project supervised by Phan Y Ly    45 minutes
English subtitles

“Bai Giua” (Middle Bank) is the name given to the low-lying land in the middle of the Red River next to Hanoi.  In this marginal space next to the city, twenty migrant families from different parts of the country live in floating houses on the river.

After a period of technical instruction from an experienced filmmaker, seven children from this community created a documentary movie on the daily life of their village, using their own footage, script and narration.

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

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.”

INDOCHINE
1992    Directed by Regis Wargnier    156 minutes
French with English subtitles and Vietnamese audio optional.

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

LIVING IN FEAR
2006   Directed by Bui Thac Chuyen    90 minutes
Vietnamese with English subtitles

Of the sixteen feature films produced in Vietnam in 2006, the most critically successful was LIVING IN FEAR, by young director Bui Thac Chuyen.  The film won that year’s Golden Kite Awards (Vietnam’s “Oscars”) for Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor, as well as the Journalists Award (sponsored by the Swedish Culture Fund) for Best Feature Film.

In addition, LIVING IN FEAR won Best Film Award in the Asian New Talent category at the 2006 Shanghai International Film Festival.

THE LOVER
1992    Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud     115 minutes
English version, with Vietnamese audio option

The first foreign film ever shot on location in Vietnam after 1975, THE LOVER is based on the autobiographical novel by French author Marguerite Duras, whose youthful real-life romance with a Chinese man in 1920s Saigon caused a major scandal.

Although the young lovers are able to transcend their differences in age, race and class, theirs is a future that French colonial Vietnamese society will never allow.

Narrated by Jeanne Moreau, THE LOVER was nominated for an Oscar in 1993 for Best Cinematography, and won a César in France for Best Music Score.

“Of course, Duras never intended THE LOVER as a romance, but as Proustian minimalism. Annaud captures her remorse for things past, the sensory delicacies of Indochina, in the sumptuousness of his images.”
– Rita Kempley, The Washington Post

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.