Cinema
Chị Tư Hậu
Phạm Kỳ Nam · 1962
Synopsis
In a coastal village in the South, during the war against France, a young woman whose husband has joined the maquis is left alone with her child. A roundup passes through, an officer rapes her; she walks out of the house and heads toward the sea. What she then makes of her life, the way she keeps her house, raises her daughter and takes her share in the resistance, fills the rest of the film, in which almost everything is conveyed by faces and very little by words.
Context
The studio then had almost no screenplays, the literature of those years yielding mostly short texts; the film therefore follows closely the short story by Anh Đức from which it starts, a hospital tale published in 1958, and says little, letting the acting carry the whole. Trà Giang was twenty and came from the first class of the Hanoi film school; Trần Phương plays the husband. The film was shown by travelling projection teams as far as the hamlets.
Who it is for
In Vietnamese, subtitled. Little dialogue, many faces; the rape is not shown, and yet everything follows from it.
Prizes and reception
Silver medal at the Moscow festival in 1963 and Golden Lotus at the national festival; the role that made its performer the country's leading actress.