Tony Bui on the Vietnam War’s Cinematic Legacy

The Vietnam War is often remembered in the U.S. as something that played out on television. Moving images of the war saturated the home front in a way that wasn’t true of any previous one. How do you think that affected filmmaking about the war?

The changes in camera technology and unprecedented access to the battlefields made coverage of the war more immediate and more intimate. For the first time, Americans were seeing graphic violence up close over dinner. That exposure led to American war films that had the same sense of urgency, intimacy, and grittiness. And that close proximity changed the tone of the storytelling. The war was no longer grand or mythic. It was immediate, chaotic, raw, and destructive.

What do you see as some of the limits of those American films? Do you find them persuasive as antiwar statements?

These films were groundbreaking in their time. But while they critique war, they rarely step outside of the American gaze. In these films, the Vietnamese themselves—soldiers and civilians—often exist on the margins, voiceless, symbolic. They were purely functional, without any real identity. What’s remembered is the American experience of Vietnam, not Vietnam itself. That narrow framing has shaped how generations have come to understand the war. Even as these films denounce the violence, they perpetuate a kind of narrative imperialism.

 

In most of these American films, like The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979), the Vietnamese characters weren’t even speaking Vietnamese. None of the films were shot in Vietnam. They were shot in the Philippines or Thailand, so they used Thai actors or Filipino actors, and they were speaking gibberish. The thinking was, “Oh, it sounds close enough to something that might be Vietnamese and that’s good enough.” But no Vietnamese person watching would think it’s Vietnamese.

 

And our collective memories are, for better or worse, often shaped by popular culture. As a child, one of the films that created a lot of difficulties for me was The Deer Hunter. The Vietnamese soldiers in the movie were portrayed as savages. Everyone thought the Russian roulette scene actually existed. There’s no evidence that it actually happened during the war. And later on, Michael Cimino, the director, admitted to that. But it created a whole generation or two where people thought the Vietnamese soldiers actually conducted those Russian-roulette acts on American soldiers. As a child, I was the Vietnamese kid in the neighborhood, and kids playing war games would mimic the Russian-roulette scene and always make me play the crazy Viet soldier. So showing these different perspectives, and more humanistic perspectives, is vital.

Let’s turn to the Vietnamese films you’ve selected for this collection. Can you tell us a bit about the origins of Vietnamese cinema? What kind of films were made in North Vietnam after it gained independence from France?

North Vietnamese cinema was deeply tied to national identity. In the early ’50s, Ho Chi Minh declared the importance of Vietnamese cinema. It came from seeing the effectiveness of cinema in the Soviet Union and China; he went to both countries, and he also spent a lot of time in France. So he saw the power of cinema and its ability to connect with people.

The first Northern cinematic film school was created in the late ’50s. A lot of the young filmmakers at the time were sent to Moscow to study. In the beginning, a lot the films that were made were documentaries. On the Same River is considered the first revolutionary narrative film in Vietnam. It was released in 1959 and remains a remarkable piece of cinema, and is in the collection.

There was an understanding that cinema was effective, even though it was extremely expensive. And during wartime, in a country trying to survive, films couldn’t just entertain. They had to tell stories that dealt with themes of sacrifice, national duty, patriotism, perseverance. But embedded within that, you see film directors and writers try to tell humanistic stories as well. You see stories about family, widows, and motherhood. And these films were seen all over the North and helped unite the country.

The connection to the Soviet film industry is really interesting. The cinematography in Ms. Tư Hậu (1963) reminded me of The Cranes Are Flying (1957).

Amazing camera work and compositions. Many of these filmmakers were trained in Soviet film schools. You can see the influence of that. In fact, when I made Three Seasons in the late ’90s, we brought equipment from America and used a Canadian company based in the city, but we used some Russian equipment as well because it was an independent film and we didn’t have a big budget. We were working with the state-run film studio in Saigon at the time. A lot of their equipment, like the cranes and tracks, came from the Soviet Union.

Watching The Little Girl of Hanoi, I was constantly asking myself, was this really filmed in the middle of these bombings? How was that film produced? Because it has a kind of documentary element woven in with its story.

The Little Girl of Hanoi is set during the infamous Christmas Bombings in December of 1972, [which was done] to get the North back to the negotiating table of the Paris Peace Accords. Officially known as Operation Linebacker II, it was a campaign of carpet bombing over the city, deliberately targeting civilian areas. The destruction seen in the film was all real.

 

It was shot two or three months after the bombings. The Little Girl of Hanoi works effectively as a piece of narrative fiction, but also feels like a documentary because of the real locations. The film was shot so soon after that many of the streets still weren’t cleaned up and not all the bodies were identified and recovered. Shooting many of the scenes was a difficult and emotional experience for the filmmakers.

Was there a parallel film industry going on in South Vietnam at that time?

Absolutely. I actually tried to find one or two films from that period to include in the program, but so much of it was lost. When the tanks rolled in and the North took control, most of the South’s cinematic history was not preserved. Only a handful of films have been saved and archived, largely because they were processed in laboratories outside Vietnam, in places like Japan and Thailand. When the war ended, these negatives were outside of Vietnam, and those are the ones that survived. I was able to identify one I wanted to include, with actress and producer Kieu Chinh, who’s still alive and working. She is eighty-seven years old and recently starred in HBO’s The Sympathizer. She made a lot of films in [South Vietnam] from the ’60s to the ’70s and believed all were lost. It wasn’t until decades later that she realized the negative for one of her films was actually in Tokyo. So she flew out there and recovered the negative. It’s a piece of cinematic history.

 

Just like the Northern films had a propaganda purpose, so did the films in the South. But the Southern films had a different quality to them because of the influence of America in Saigon at the time. They also produced action films and films with a lot of singing and dancing—the kinds of entertainment that were absent from the films in the North, with a few exceptions.

When the Tenth Month Comes (1984) is a remarkable film that is recognized as one of the greatest works of Vietnamese cinema. It was made after reunification, and takes place during Vietnam’s war with the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. What do you think it tells us about the experience of Vietnamese people who lived through all these conflicts?

When the Tenth Month Comes is a masterpiece about quiet endurance. It doesn’t show the battlefield. It shows what war does to individuals and families. The film tells the story of a woman trying to hold her family together by concealing her husband’s death and creating false letters as if they’re written by him. It’s about the relationship between strength and grief played out in unexpected ways.

 

It’s about how noncombatants suffered greatly in this war, because of this war. How do you deal with that in a way that still maintains your dignity and the dignity of your family? It’s a deeply Vietnamese story, but its emotional truth is universal.

 

[The director] Đặng Nhật Minh, who’s still alive, is considered a legendary filmmaker in Vietnam. He also started out in documentaries and transitioned over to narrative.

Finally, I want to ask about your own film, Three Seasons, which was released in 1999—almost equidistant in time between the fall of Saigon and today. Your film is very much concerned with what was then contemporary life in Ho Chi Minh City, but it was haunted by the legacy of the war as well. How were you hoping to intervene in the way that Vietnam was imagined on-screen? And how do you look back on the film now, a quarter-century later?

When I made Three Seasons, Vietnam was, for many Western audiences, a place frozen in wartime imagery: napalm, soldiers, helicopters, jungles. I wanted to intervene by shifting the lens entirely—to tell a story not about the war itself, but about its lingering echoes in the lives of everyday Vietnamese people.

 

The film was my attempt to capture a country in transition, leaving behind the war with the West, but facing a new kind of challenge: the complexities of opening back up and facing an onslaught of westernization, capitalism, and rapid transformation. I wanted to convey that tension in the lives of the characters, ordinary people navigating a city caught between tradition and modernity, memory and inevitable change.