Cinema
Hoa của trời
Đỗ Minh Tuấn · 1995
Synopsis
In a village in the North under the bombs, little Ky lives with his mother, his grandfather and his uncle Hoàng. The hamlet chief says that Ky's father died fleeing the fighting, and his son Găm calls the boy a coward's child. The same chief forces his son to marry Nhàng, Hoàng's betrothed. None of this is discussed aloud: rumour is enough, and the child grows up with a reputation he did not make.
Context
Produced by the Hanoi fiction film studio from a screenplay by Lê Ngọc Minh, with songs composed by the director himself, who is also a poet and painter. The action takes place during the American bombing campaign of the mid-sixties, and the village is less a wartime setting than a place where rumour decides people's fates: it is a dead man about whom no one knows anything who determines a child's life.
Who it is for
In Vietnamese. A children's film that is only half one: it is necessary to know how much a family's reputation weighed in the countryside of the North in the sixties.
Prizes and reception
Writing prize to Lê Ngọc Minh at the eleventh national gathering, in 1996, for this film and another from the same period.