Mạnh Cường

A Lifetime of Resentment

11 Months and 5 Days

A young woman leaves Ho Chi Minh City to start a new career. She has to face many problems in a new life alone.

Three Seasons

The residents of Ho Chi Minh City face modernization amid widespread poverty. A retired American Marine arrives on a search for his daughter, whom he abandoned at the end of the Vietnam War. Elsewhere, a cyclo driver falls for a troubled prostitute and schemes to raise money so he can spend time with her. Additionally, a young women begins harvesting lotuses for a writer suffering from leprosy, and a child trinket seller loses his traveling case.

Cyclo

Follows a young cyclo driver on his poverty-driven descent into criminality in modern-day Ho Chi Minh City. The boy's struggles to scratch out a living for his two sisters and grandfather in the mean streets of the city lead to petty crime on behalf of a mysterious Madame from whom he rents his cyclo.

The Vertical Ray of the Sun

Hanoi comes across almost picture-perfect in director Tran Anh Hung's beautiful, elegiac tale about the lives and loves of three Vietnamese sisters. A mood characteristic of Hung's films is set early on with the vivid sounds of birds, insects and water and the way the lighting enhances the subtle use of color. They all combine to gem-like effect here.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

After a Vietnamese woman dies in a car crash in Saigon, her brother-in-law and her young son transport her body back to the former’s hometown in rural Vietnam, where they plan to give her a funeral.

Thi Mai

After losing her daughter in an accident, Carmen loses all incentive to keep going, until she receives an unexpected letter from the adoption agency: her daughter was finally granted the Vietnamese girl she had asked for adoption and whose name is Thi Mai.

Fortune Favors the Brave

Eleven-year-old Linh shows great grace under pressure. When her mother, who’s raising her kids on her own, has to return unexpectedly to Vietnam, Linh looks after her little sister Tien and the family restaurant on her own. Of course, no one is supposed to find out, not the school, not the neighbours, and definitely not child protective services. But Linh’s biggest problem has red hair, a telescope and a sly grin: Pauline. The daredevil from across the street has the whole neighbourhood under surveillance and can’t imagine anything cooler than a life without parents. When Pauline blackmails the Vietnamese sisters into starting a gang with her, the three girls set off on a daring adventure.

21 and a Wake-Up

"I learn that Chris McIntyre served in Vietnam and that "21 and a Wakeup," set in an Army hospital in the waning days of the war, is based on events that he experienced and heard about." - Roger Ebert

The Backstage Slap

A theater troupe reunites in excitement for a new production after having been out of work for a long time, with the performers and their mentor having gone their separate ways to make ends meet. But the bitter fallout from the failed romance between the lead actor and the lead actress—a romance as long ago as her famously beautiful hair—threatens the play's success.