Cinema
Hãy tha thứ cho em
Lưu Trọng Ninh · 1993
Synopsis
Mai studies the violin and is entrusted with the lead role in a film about the war against the Americans: that of a young woman who lived a quarter of a century before her and whom the director, then a soldier, had loved. Between the set, her classes and the nights of Hanoi, she falls in love with this past without understanding any of it, and feels she is being asked to be someone else. The film being shot and the one being watched end up answering each other from one scene to the next.
Context
Thirty thousand dollars, the average price of a Vietnamese fiction film at the time, and East German Orwo film stock manufactured in 1990, left in storage for two years in the humid heat: its sensitivity had dropped from twenty-one to nine degrees, which ruled out large ensemble scenes and forced the performers to act under projectors placed as close as possible. The director is the ninth son of a poet of the 1930 generation, who came to cinema after engineering studies and military service.
Who it is for
Seventy-six minutes, in Vietnamese with subtitles. A film within the film: at every moment one must know which of the two one is watching, the one being shot or the one that tells it.
Prizes and reception
Prize for directing at the tenth national event, in 1993, shared with another film by the same director; one of the ten titles in competition at Nantes the same year.