The Vietnam War through the Vietnamese lens

This week marks 50 years since images of overloaded helicopters and desperate crowds clamouring to escape from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon, signalling the iconic end to the US’s ill-fated Cold War misadventures in Vietnam.

In the half century since the Vietnam War — which arguably more than any other event in US 20th century history, indelibly transformed society away from trust in government and belief in the honesty of those in positions of power — it has been a fertile subject for filmmakers.

The US perspective and introspecting about the war and its effects on the psyche and political landscapes of the nation has given us classics such as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Casualties of War, and spawned 80s pop-culture icons like John Rambo, the A-Team and Stringfellow Hawke.

What’s been less celebrated and overlooked are the cinematic interpretations made by the Vietnamese. While these are often arguably less technically spectacular and often of a more directly propagandist slant, they still offer a necessary, dramatic and human-centred side to a story that’s been constantly retold, retooled and revised since it ended on April 30 1975.

Here are three films directly and tangentially about that fateful period, told by Vietnamese creators and offering a glimpse into what life was like for those on the ground, whose stories have been ignored by a cinematic record that’s more concerned with those who donned military boots and headed over to fight a war they couldn’t and didn’t win.

THE ART-HOUSE ESSENTIAL:

The Little Girl of Hanoi — YouTube

Director Hai Ninh’s 1974 film is a slice of social realism in the vein of post-World War 2 Italian neorealists like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. Short and emotionally sharp, the 70-minute drama follows a young Vietnamese girl in the city of Saigon as she searches for her father — a soldier in the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) after the US bombing of the city in 1972 killed both her mother and sister.

Shot while the war was still under way, the film captures the destruction of the US bombing campaign and the effects it wrought on ordinary Vietnamese civilians. While US patriots might write off its anti-Americanism as communist propaganda, there’s an emotional weight to its small but difficult story and its depiction of the realities of the war that make it more than just a politicised message film. And while it may be righteously and rightfully pro-Vietnam in its focus, it doesn’t write off its US antagonists with the brusque stereotyping that so many US films have used in their depictions of the war.

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THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC:

When the Tenth Month Comes — Mubi

The first Vietnamese film to be released in the West after the end of the war, director Dang Nhat Ming’s 1984 film focuses not so much on the details of the war but on its emotional consequences.

Set in rural North Vietnam after the end of the war, and so more Vietnam War-adjacent than directly about the war, the story centres on a young woman who makes her living as a performer in a theatre troupe while her husband fights in the PAVN in South Vietnam.

While on a trip to reunite with her husband in the South she learns that he has died and returns home devastated and determined not to let her family know the tragic truth. Working with a local schoolteacher who has some poetry skills, she crafts letters home from her dead husband to keep her family blissfully ignorant and in the process reconciles with her own grief and discovers the possibility of new love and hope.

Subdued in its execution but emotionally hefty, it’s a film that offers a decidedly human portrayal of Vietnam and its people that stands as an effective rejoinder to the two-dimensional Hollywood depictions that have become so ingrained in western popular cultural consciousness.

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THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH:

The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone — YouTube

Nguyen Hong Sen’s 1979 drama is set almost completely within the confines of a rice field in the infamous free-fire zone of the Mekong Delta, where one family face the challenges of the demands placed on them by North Vietnamese forces amid a battle against omnipotent US helicopters.

The daily rituals of the two-parent, one-baby family’s life in a small shack on the water: planting rice, raising children, catching fish; are contrasted with the “helicopter-eye-view” of US forces, searching the fields for guerrilla fighters to pick off.

As the helicopter raids increase in number, the family is tasked by the Vietcong with keeping lines of communication to soldiers open by any means necessary and their dedication to the cause will jeopardise their domestic life and bring them to a fateful final confrontation that will change their lives forever.

Winner of the Golden and Prix FIPRESCI Prizes at the 12 International Moscow Film Festival, it’s a decidedly unapologetic Vietcong side of the story drama that still has plenty of emotional punch to deliver to viewers from both sides of the war.

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