A deeply moving film debut by a promising director from Vietnam, Father and Son has been praised by foreign film critics as one of the best works from the Vietnamese cinema world in the past decade.

A scene from Father and Son

Earlier, the first film by Luong Dinh Dung won the Best Feature Film Award at the Canadian Diversity Film Festival (Canada) and Best Camera Award at the Barcelona Planet Film Festival (Spain).

The film adapted from Dung’s short story by the same name, written in 1995, has now been nominated for a prestigious REMI Award at the upcoming 50th Annual WorldFest-Houston.

WorldFest, held annually in Houston Texas, the US, is the oldest Independent Film & Video Festival in the World.

In Father and Son, Dung deliberately breaks away from the commercial trends of Vietnamese cinema (martial arts, detective sagas or light comedies) to concentrate upon domestic drama that calls to mind the best of Vidor, Wyler and Stevens.

To a certain degree, the film has been called ‘autobiographical’ because it involves a young boy whose fantasy world is the cinema, as an escape from the squatter-hut poverty in which his family lives.

The boy’s father, a clerk of minor status, has great ambitions for his son and is appalled by the lad’s academic indifferences; there is a constant struggle between the two to reach an understanding of mutual goals.

The film covers a 20-year period, so that the relationship between father and son is totally delineated and there are sequences of great emotional power and sincerity which are universally true—like most great films, an undercurrent of tragedy permeates the work.

Sometimes, the idea of respect creates an impossible distance, and only after chagrin, agonies and, often, separation, can a parent and child hear each other’s hearts beating from afar.

VOV