Cinema
The Wild Reed
Cỏ lau
Vương Đức · 1993
Synopsis
Having gone north at the beginning of the war, Lực left his old father and his young wife, Thai, in Quảng Trị. A body washed up by the flood was taken for his and buried; Thai then remarried, to Quảng, a photographer. With peace restored, Lực returns to recover the bodies of his comrades in a land covered with anonymous graves, and the photographer, without knowing who he is, takes him home. Three living people find themselves facing a death that never took place.
Context
The first film by its director, drawn from the last long narrative by Nguyễn Minh Châu, who had died four years earlier, and adapted by Colonel Thái Kế Toại under a pen name. Đơn Dương plays Lực, Minh Châu plays Thai. The adaptation removes from one of the female characters the nickname she bore in the source, and makes the photographer a less unpleasant man than in the text. The narrative it comes from had appeared in 1989, the year of its author's death, who had himself fought in the war in that province.
Who it is for
In Vietnamese. Nothing to know beforehand, except that Quảng Trị was cut in two for twenty years and that its villages buried there dead whom they had not identified.
Prizes and reception
Golden Torch, the highest prize of the fourth festival of non-aligned and developing countries, in Pyongyang in 1994, then broadcast by Chinese television.