This year the national focus of the International Forum of Young Cinema will be on new Vietnamese cinema. As part of the Berlin Film Festival, we will present eight films offering an impressive inside view of Vietnamese history and present-day life. As ever, the Vietnam War is the dominant theme, although film-makers have only recently been able to show in a very moving manner the devastating and fundamental impact the years of war had on Vietnamese society despite its victory over the United States.
One outstanding example is BEN KHONG CHONG (Wharf of Widows, 2000) byLuu Trong Ninh. The film takes place in a small village inhabited almost exclusively by women, old people and children. Without a hint of propagandistic glossing over, BEN KHONG CHONG shows how decadesspent without their warring men make the women left behind into thetrue heroines of this Southeast Asian nation. Left to their own devices, they must defend their village against more than external enemies. Envy over the slightest happiness in the neighbourhood and near-terrorist feudal attitudes are just some of the effects of the war-invoked state of emergency whose cryptic day-to-day life it was impossible to film for a long time.
DOI CAT (Sandy Lives, 1999) by Nguyen Thanh Van also tells of a tragic love story. Like countless other soldiers, the film's protagonist cannot return to his wife in the south for decades after the victory over the French. He falls in love anew, fathers a child and, to his great consternation, discovers at the end of the war that his wife in the south has waited for him.
Le Hoang's AI XUOI VAN LY (The Long Journey, 1997) takes place in present-day Vietnam. A veteran decides to bring the ashes of a comrade-in-arms back to his mother. The eventful journey becomes a subtle study of the mentality of a country whose exceptional landscape has rarely been shown so impressively on the big screen. VAO NAM RA BAC (Heading South Going North, 2000) by Babelsberg-traineddirector Phi Tien Son is currently prompting a lively discussion in Vietnam. In a first for the Vietnamese cinema, the film portrays a battle-weary, though by no means dispirited deserter based according to Son on his own experiences.
Viet Linh's CHUNG CU (The Building, 1999) tells of the complicated coexistence between former 'class enemies' in a single building, as does MUA OI (Season of Guavas, 2000) by Dang Nhat Minh, the story of a colonial villa. Both films are surprisingly open in their criticism of the greedy victors' mentality of the Communist leadership.
In TRO LAI NGU THUY (Returning to Ngu Thuy, 1999) one of Vietnam's most well-known documentary film-makers, Le Manh Thich, returns to a village where he had filmed the heroic wartime deeds of its women in 1971 (for which he was awarded a prize at the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival). Thirty years on, the enthusiastic female soldiers have become old women. Their recollections on seeing the historic recordings are a moving plea for peace.
We will screen Luu Trong Ninh's NGA BA DONG LOC (Ten Girls of Dong Loc, 1997) as a document of Vietnamese cinema based - albeit in an almost droll fashion - on another famous women's battalion.
Dietmar Ratsch's EISLIMONADE FÜR HONG LI in our "New German Cinema"series is also about Vietnam. Ratsch accompanies eastern Germanphotographer Thomas Billhardt to places he visited in wartime, duringwhich, among other things, he experienced the bombing of Hanoi. In his research, Billhardt stumbles upon people like his old friend Nguyen Van Nhiem who, just like Phi Tien Son, later studied cinematography in Babelsberg. Son, Nhiem and the directors of the other Vietnamese films will be the Forum's guests during the Berlinale and will report in detail about film-making in present-day Vietnam.

This programme is generously supported by "Vietnam Airlines".

January 16th, 2001