Cinema
Đời cát
Nguyễn Thanh Vân · 1999
Synopsis
With the war over, Cảnh leaves his unit in the North and returns to his fishing village, south of the former dividing line, where Thoa has waited for him for more than twenty years. He does not hide that he remarried there and has a little girl. Soon afterwards, Tâm, the second wife, arrives in the village with the child. Three adults and a little girl then find themselves in the same house of sand, with no one being either wrong or right.
Context
The filmmaker had read in 1993, in the weekly Văn nghệ, the text by Hữu Phương from which this film is adapted, and it took him seven drafts and four years of work with Nguyễn Quang Lập to see it through. The studio at first refused the subject, judged sensitive; the matter was settled in 1998. The director is the son of the filmmaker Hải Ninh, of the previous generation.
Who it is for
In Vietnamese with subtitles. There is nothing to know beforehand, except that the country was split in two for twenty-one years and that hundreds of thousands of men lived on either side of the divide.
Prizes and reception
Golden Lotus, direction, screenplay and two prizes for female performance at the thirteenth national event; best film at the Asia-Pacific festival held in Hanoi in 2000.