Vietnamese cinema is far richer and more varied than international audiences sometimes realize. Its history encompasses wartime films made under extraordinarily difficult conditions, intimate rural dramas, postwar reflections, lush romantic films, martial-arts adventures, horror, queer cinema, family melodramas, independent productions, and some of Southeast Asia’s most accomplished contemporary art-house filmmaking.
For decades, many Vietnamese films were difficult to see outside Vietnam. That has gradually changed as restorations, international film festivals, streaming services, diaspora filmmakers, and renewed interest in Vietnamese film history have introduced wider audiences to both classic and contemporary works.
This list brings together 50 Vietnamese-language films worth discovering. It is not a strict ranking. Instead, the films are arranged roughly chronologically so that you can follow the evolution of Vietnamese cinema from its early postcolonial period through the international breakthroughs of the 1990s and the increasingly diverse films being made today.
Some selections are international or Vietnamese-diaspora co-productions rather than productions financed entirely within Vietnam. They are included when Vietnamese is the principal or a substantial language and Vietnamese life, history, or culture is central to the film.
🎬 1. On the Same River (Chung Một Dòng Sông) — 1959
Directors: Nguyễn Hồng Nghi and Phạm Hiếu Dân
Often identified as the first feature produced by North Vietnam’s national film industry, On the Same River is an essential starting point for understanding modern Vietnamese cinema. Its story of lovers separated by the partition of Vietnam uses personal longing to reflect a much larger national division.
Viewed today, its historical context is impossible to separate from its storytelling. Yet it is valuable not simply as a political artifact but as evidence of how quickly Vietnamese filmmakers began using intimate relationships and melodrama to explore the country’s enormous social upheavals.
🎬 2. 17th Parallel, Nights and Days (Vĩ Tuyến 17 Ngày và Đêm) — 1973
Director: Hải Ninh
Set around the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Vietnam, this ambitious wartime drama follows ordinary people living within an extraordinary political and military situation.
Trà Giang’s performance became particularly celebrated, earning her recognition at the Moscow International Film Festival. The film remains one of the defining works of Vietnam’s wartime cinema, combining national history with the emotional cost borne by families and communities.
🎬 3. The Little Girl of Hanoi (Em Bé Hà Nội) — 1974
Director: Hải Ninh
One of the most memorable Vietnamese films about the war, The Little Girl of Hanoi follows a child searching for her family amid the destruction of Hanoi following American bombing.
Its perspective is deliberately intimate. Instead of attempting to communicate war primarily through military strategy or large battles, the movie places a young girl within devastated streets and allows her experiences to represent the civilian cost of conflict.
It is a difficult film historically and emotionally, but an important one for viewers interested in how Vietnamese filmmakers represented the war from within Vietnam itself.
🎬 4. The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone (Cánh Đồng Hoang) — 1979
Director: Nguyễn Hồng Sến
Set in the wetlands of the Mekong Delta, The Abandoned Field follows a family attempting to survive while living beneath the threat of American helicopter attacks.
The landscape is crucial to the film. Water, reeds, mud, and open sky create a simultaneously beautiful and threatening environment, while shifts in perspective emphasize the enormous gap between people trying to maintain ordinary family life and the machinery of war above them.
The film won major honors at the Moscow International Film Festival and remains one of the internationally best-known Vietnamese war films of its era.
🎬 5. When the Tenth Month Comes (Bao Giờ Cho Đến Tháng Mười) — 1984
Director: Đặng Nhật Minh
For many critics and historians, When the Tenth Month Comes belongs on any shortlist of the greatest Vietnamese films.
A woman learns that her husband has died while away fighting, but conceals the news from her elderly father-in-law. With the help of a village schoolteacher, she maintains the illusion that her husband is still alive through fabricated letters.
What might have become a straightforward wartime melodrama instead becomes a haunting meditation on mourning, duty, memory, love, and the private emotional consequences of national conflict. Đặng Nhật Minh’s restrained approach gives grief room to breathe, creating a film that remains moving decades later.
🎬 6. The Girl on the River (Cô Gái Trên Sông) — 1987
Director: Đặng Nhật Minh
Đặng Nhật Minh returned to questions of memory and postwar society with The Girl on the River, which revolves around a former sex worker recalling how she once sheltered an injured revolutionary during the war.
The film is particularly interesting because it complicates uncomplicated heroic narratives. Memory is uncomfortable, gratitude is uncertain, and the transition from revolution to postwar society does not necessarily reward the people who made sacrifices.
It is one of Đặng Nhật Minh’s most searching examinations of the difference between official history and individual experience.
🎬 7. The Retired General (Tướng Về Hưu) — 1988
Director: Nguyễn Khắc Lợi
Adapted from a story by Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, The Retired General turns away from battlefield heroism to ask what happens when a military man returns permanently to ordinary domestic life.
The retired general finds a society changing around him and a family whose priorities no longer resemble the values by which he has lived. The resulting tensions give the film a darker, more satirical edge than many earlier Vietnamese dramas.
Its disillusionment made it an important film during Vietnam’s Đổi Mới era, when filmmakers increasingly began examining the contradictions and social transformations of contemporary life.
🎬 8. Travelling Circus (Gánh Xiếc Rong) — 1988
Director: Việt Linh
A traveling circus arrives in a desperately poor mountain community and offers its inhabitants magic, spectacle, and temporary escape.
That simple premise allows Việt Linh to explore the uncomfortable relationship between hope and illusion. What does entertainment mean to people struggling with hunger? When does wonder become exploitation?
The film’s fable-like quality gives it a timelessness that extends beyond the specific moment in which it was produced.
🎬 9. The Bitter Taste of Love (Vị Đắng Tình Yêu) — 1990
Director: Lê Xuân Hoàng
One of the major popular successes of early Đổi Mới-era Vietnamese cinema, The Bitter Taste of Love follows a romance between a poor medical student and a young woman from a wealthier background.
Its mixture of romance, tragedy, class difference, and youthful aspiration connected strongly with Vietnamese audiences. The film is useful in a list like this precisely because Vietnamese cinema cannot be understood solely through festival films and wartime dramas; popular melodrama also played an important role in rebuilding a domestic moviegoing culture.
🎬 10. The Scent of Green Papaya (Mùi Đu Đủ Xanh) — 1993
Director: Trần Anh Hùng
Few Vietnamese-language films have achieved the international visibility of The Scent of Green Papaya.
Set in 1950s Saigon, the film observes domestic life largely through Mùi, a young servant who enters the household of a troubled family. Trần Anh Hùng pays extraordinary attention to sound, texture, food, plants, water, insects, light, and quiet gestures.
The result is less a conventionally plotted drama than a sensory experience. The film won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes and became the first film representing Vietnam to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
It remains an ideal entry point for anyone beginning to explore Vietnamese-language cinema.
🎬 11. Nostalgia for the Countryside (Thương Nhớ Đồng Quê) — 1995
Director: Đặng Nhật Minh
Adapted from writing by Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, Nostalgia for the Countryside views rural life through characters caught between tradition, poverty, migration, desire, and an increasingly changing Vietnam.
The countryside is beautiful, but Đặng Nhật Minh never turns it into an uncomplicated pastoral paradise. Economic limitations and social expectations shape nearly every character’s choices.
It is an especially valuable film for understanding the cultural transformations accompanying Vietnam’s economic reforms.
🎬 12. Cyclo (Xích Lô) — 1995
Director: Trần Anh Hùng
After the quiet sensuality of The Scent of Green Papaya, Trần Anh Hùng made something radically different.
Cyclo plunges into a violent, neon-lit Ho Chi Minh City where a young bicycle-taxi driver becomes entangled with criminals after his cyclo is stolen. Tony Leung Chiu-wai appears as a mysterious gangster known as the Poet, while Trần Nữ Yên Khê plays the driver’s sister.
The movie is intense, fragmented, sometimes surreal, and intentionally uncomfortable. Its combination of social realism and fever-dream imagery won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and confirmed Trần Anh Hùng as an important international filmmaker.
🎬 13. Gone, Gone, Forever Gone (Bụi Hồng) — 1996
Director: Hồ Quang Minh
Hồ Quang Minh was one of several overseas Vietnamese filmmakers who helped build connections between Vietnamese stories and international production networks during the 1980s and 1990s.
Gone, Gone, Forever Gone examines the scars left by war and displacement rather than treating the end of fighting as the end of its consequences. Like many of the strongest films from this period, it is interested in what history does to private lives long after official events have passed.
The film was selected to represent Vietnam in the Academy Awards’ foreign-language category.
🎬 14. Three Seasons (Ba Mùa) — 1999
Director: Tony Bui
One of the best-known Vietnamese-diaspora films of the late 1990s, Three Seasons interweaves several lives in Ho Chi Minh City during a period of rapid economic change.
A lotus seller, a cyclo driver, a street child, and an American veteran become part of a portrait of a city balancing memory and modernization. The movie contains both Vietnamese and English dialogue, but Vietnamese characters and experiences form its emotional center.
Its success at the Sundance Film Festival helped introduce a new generation of international viewers to contemporary Vietnamese stories.
🎬 15. The Vertical Ray of the Sun (Mùa Hè Chiều Thẳng Đứng) — 2000
Director: Trần Anh Hùng
Trần Anh Hùng’s third Vietnamese-language feature is perhaps his most relaxed and luminous.
Set largely in Hanoi, the film follows three sisters whose affectionate family rituals coexist with romantic secrets, uncertainty, and quiet dissatisfaction. Meals, music, rain, morning light, and domestic spaces are treated with as much importance as major dramatic revelations.
Anyone who loved the sensory qualities of The Scent of Green Papaya should seek this one out.
🎬 16. The Guava House / The Season of Guavas (Mùa Ổi) — 2000
Director: Đặng Nhật Minh
A middle-aged man named Hòa, whose mental development was affected by a childhood accident, remains deeply attached to memories of his family’s former home—especially a guava tree in its garden.
His attempts to reconnect with that place create an unexpectedly tender relationship with a young woman now living there.
Rather than turning memory into simple nostalgia, Đặng Nhật Minh asks what happens when the physical world continues changing while someone remains emotionally rooted in a vanished past. It is a gentle, melancholy film and one of the director’s finest later works.
🎬 17. The Deserted Valley (Thung Lũng Hoang Vắng) — 2001
Director: Phạm Nhuệ Giang
Set around a small school in an isolated mountainous region, The Deserted Valley focuses on teachers and children living far from Vietnam’s rapidly modernizing urban centers.
Its remote setting allows the film to explore duty, loneliness, education, relationships, and the difficulty of building a life in a place many people hope eventually to leave.
The movie’s patient observation and attention to overlooked rural communities make it an important work from the early 2000s.
🎬 18. A Time Far Past (Thời Xa Vắng) — 2004
Director: Hồ Quang Minh
Based on Lê Lựu’s influential novel, A Time Far Past follows the life of a man whose personal choices are continually constrained by family expectations, social convention, and historical change.
Beginning in northern Vietnam during the 1950s, the story uses one man’s life to examine how political and social systems penetrate deeply into apparently private decisions such as marriage and love.
Its deliberate style and literary origins make it especially rewarding for viewers interested in Vietnamese history beyond conventional war narratives.
🎬 19. Buffalo Boy (Mùa Len Trâu) — 2004
Director: Nguyễn Võ Nghiêm Minh
Set in the flooded landscapes of southern Vietnam, Buffalo Boy follows a teenager charged with moving his family’s buffalo to higher ground during the seasonal inundation.
The journey becomes a coming-of-age story shaped by water, survival, masculinity, violence, and the rhythms of rural life.
The landscape is extraordinary, but it never functions merely as scenery. Flooding determines how people travel, work, form relationships, and survive. The film became one of the most internationally recognized Vietnamese productions of the 2000s.
🎬 20. Story of Pao (Chuyện Của Pao) — 2006
Director: Ngô Quang Hải
Set among Hmong communities in northern Vietnam, Story of Pao follows a young woman trying to understand family secrets and the complicated lives of the women around her.
The mountainous landscapes are visually striking, but the movie’s real strength lies in its attention to identity, motherhood, love, and cultural expectations.
It won major honors in Vietnam and was selected as the country’s submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
🎬 21. The White Silk Dress (Áo Lụa Hà Đông) — 2006
Director: Lưu Huỳnh
An áo dài passed through a struggling family becomes the central symbol in this sweeping historical melodrama.
Beginning during the final years of French colonial rule and continuing through decades of instability and war, The White Silk Dress concentrates enormous historical change within the life of one family.
Its emotional approach is unapologetically melodramatic, but that is part of its power. The film connects clothing, family memory, womanhood, poverty, and national identity in a story designed to move its audience.
🎬 22. The Rebel (Dòng Máu Anh Hùng) — 2007
Director: Charlie Nguyễn
For viewers who assume Vietnamese cinema consists primarily of quiet art-house dramas, The Rebel provides an exhilarating correction.
Set during French colonial rule, this martial-arts adventure follows an agent who begins questioning his allegiance after encountering a resistance fighter.
Johnny Trí Nguyễn, Ngô Thanh Vân, and Dustin Nguyễn give the film considerable star power, while its fight choreography helped demonstrate that Vietnamese filmmakers could produce ambitious commercial action cinema with international appeal.
🎬 23. Owl and the Sparrow (Cú và Chim Se Sẻ) — 2007
Director: Stephane Gauger
A runaway girl selling flowers on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City becomes the unexpected link between a lonely flight attendant and an equally lonely zookeeper.
Shot with a modest budget and an intimate feeling for the city, Owl and the Sparrow finds warmth without becoming excessively sentimental.
Its small-scale story gives urban Vietnam a lived-in quality that larger productions sometimes miss.
🎬 24. Adrift (Chơi Vơi) — 2009
Director: Bùi Thạc Chuyên
Marriage, friendship, sexuality, jealousy, and emotional uncertainty collide in this sophisticated Hanoi drama.
A young bride’s marriage remains unconsummated while her female friend harbors feelings for her and pushes her toward another man. Rather than simplifying these relationships into heroes and villains, Adrift allows desire to remain messy and contradictory.
Its mature approach to sexuality and emotional isolation helped establish Bùi Thạc Chuyên and screenwriter Phan Đăng Di as major voices in contemporary Vietnamese art cinema.
🎬 25. Don’t Burn (Đừng Đốt) — 2009
Director: Đặng Nhật Minh
Based on the real wartime diary of physician Đặng Thùy Trâm, Don’t Burn connects Vietnamese and American experiences through the survival of her writings after her death.
The movie is less interested in turning its subject into a flawless symbol than in emphasizing her youth, compassion, homesickness, fear, and hopes for peace.
Coming from Đặng Nhật Minh late in his career, it feels like a continuation of his decades-long attempt to understand war through individual human lives rather than spectacle.
🎬 26. Floating Lives (Cánh Đồng Bất Tận) — 2010
Director: Nguyễn Phan Quang Bình
Set amid the waterways of the Mekong Delta, Floating Lives follows a deeply wounded father and his children as they live an itinerant existence herding ducks.
Their fragile family dynamic changes when they encounter a woman who has herself been mistreated and marginalized.
Beautiful landscapes contrast with anger, trauma, sexuality, and resentment. The film is adapted from work by acclaimed writer Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, whose stories would later inspire Glorious Ashes.
🎬 27. Bi, Don’t Be Afraid! (Bi, Đừng Sợ!) — 2010
Director: Phan Đăng Di
A young boy moves through a Hanoi household filled with adults whose desires and frustrations he only partly understands.
Phan Đăng Di avoids conventional exposition, allowing gestures, spaces, silences, sexuality, illness, and heat to reveal the fractures within the family.
The film became an important international breakthrough for Vietnam’s emerging independent cinema and signaled a growing willingness among filmmakers to explore intimate subjects outside traditional commercial formulas.
🎬 28. The Scent of Burning Grass (Mùi Cỏ Cháy) — 2012
Director: Nguyễn Hữu Mười
Inspired by the experiences of young soldiers during the 1972 fighting around Quảng Trị, The Scent of Burning Grass looks at war through a group of university students who leave behind ordinary youthful lives for the battlefield.
The emphasis on friendship and lost youth gives the film much of its emotional weight.
It was selected as Vietnam’s entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
🎬 29. Blood Letter (Thiên Mệnh Anh Hùng) — 2012
Director: Victor Vũ
Victor Vũ embraces the traditions of the martial-arts adventure in this stylish historical action film.
A young man drawn into a story of revenge, political intrigue, and hidden identity must uncover the truth surrounding his family while confronting powerful enemies.
Swordplay, elaborate period settings, and striking cinematography make Blood Letter one of the most entertaining Vietnamese genre films of its decade.
🎬 30. Flapping in the Middle of Nowhere (Đập Cánh Giữa Không Trung) — 2014
Director: Nguyễn Hoàng Điệp
A young Hanoi student becomes pregnant while she and her immature boyfriend struggle financially. Her attempt to obtain money for an abortion gradually draws her into relationships that complicate rather than simplify her choices.
Nguyễn Hoàng Điệp treats the character’s sexuality and uncertainty with an unusual mixture of realism and dreamlike imagery.
The film received significant recognition on the international festival circuit and remains one of the strongest Vietnamese independent debuts of the 2010s.
🎬 31. Big Father, Small Father and Other Stories (Cha Và Con Và…) — 2015
Director: Phan Đăng Di
Set in a changing Saigon, this atmospheric drama follows a young photography student drawn toward his charismatic male roommate and the nightlife surrounding him.
Masculinity, sexuality, economic pressure, family expectations, and government population policies intersect without the film forcing them into a tidy message.
Its selection for competition at the Berlin International Film Festival marked another important step for Vietnamese independent cinema.
🎬 32. Yellow Flowers on the Green Grass (Tôi Thấy Hoa Vàng Trên Cỏ Xanh) — 2015
Director: Victor Vũ
Based on Nguyễn Nhật Ánh’s popular novel, Yellow Flowers on the Green Grass turns toward childhood, sibling rivalry, first love, jealousy, and rural memory.
Victor Vũ’s beautifully photographed countryside helps give the movie the texture of remembered childhood rather than simple realism.
Its accessibility and emotional warmth made it a major domestic success, demonstrating that ambitious Vietnamese filmmaking could connect with a broad mainstream audience as well as festival viewers.
🎬 33. The Housemaid (Cô Hầu Gái) — 2016
Director: Derek Nguyễn
Vietnamese history meets Gothic horror in The Housemaid, set on a French-owned rubber plantation during the colonial era.
A young Vietnamese woman takes employment at an isolated estate, where romance, exploitation, trauma, and supernatural forces become increasingly difficult to separate.
The plantation setting gives familiar Gothic conventions a distinctly Vietnamese historical context and helped the movie find an international genre audience.
🎬 34. Father and Son (Cha Cõng Con) — 2017
Director: Lương Đình Dũng
A poor fisherman and his young son live a modest life near a river until the boy becomes seriously ill.
Their subsequent journey transforms a simple father-son relationship into a deeply emotional story about love, poverty, mortality, and what parents are willing to endure for their children.
The film’s restrained performances and spectacular natural settings earned it festival attention, and Vietnam selected it as its Academy Award submission.
🎬 35. The Tailor (Cô Ba Sài Gòn) — 2017
Directors: Trần Bửu Lộc and Nguyễn Lê Phương Khanh
Fashion, family tradition, comedy, and fantasy come together in this affectionate celebration of the áo dài.
A young woman dismissive of her family’s traditional tailoring business is forced to reconsider what cultural inheritance means when her circumstances change dramatically.
Bright, playful, and unapologetically accessible, The Tailor offers a useful counterpoint to the heavier dramas that often dominate international discussions of Vietnamese film.
🎬 36. The Way Station (Đảo Của Dân Ngụ Cư) — 2017
Director: Hồng Ánh
Set around an isolated restaurant where employees and family members share an enclosed existence, The Way Station is interested in people who seem suspended between destinations.
Desire, disability, loneliness, cultural difference, and unspoken histories gradually emerge from the confined setting.
Actor Hồng Ánh’s feature directing debut attracted international festival attention and established her as a filmmaker to watch.
🎬 37. Song Lang — 2018
Director: Leon Lê
One of the most beautiful Vietnamese films of recent years, Song Lang brings the traditional theatrical form cải lương to the center of an intimate drama.
In 1980s Saigon, a hard-edged debt collector encounters the star of a cải lương troupe and gradually reveals his own connection to the art form. What begins with hostility develops into a quiet and emotionally charged bond.
Music, performance, regret, masculinity, and unrealized possibilities give the film an aching melancholy. For viewers interested in Vietnamese performing arts as well as cinema, Song Lang is essential.
🎬 38. The Third Wife (Vợ Ba) — 2018
Director: Ash Mayfair
Set in rural northern Vietnam during the 19th century, The Third Wife follows a young teenager who enters a wealthy household as the third wife of an older landowner.
Within an exquisitely photographed domestic world, she begins understanding the limits imposed upon women and the complicated desires existing beneath the household’s orderly surface.
The film attracted major international attention for Ash Mayfair’s visual confidence and its examination of gender, marriage, sexuality, and power.
🎬 39. The Immortal (Người Bất Tử) — 2018
Director: Victor Vũ
Victor Vũ combines horror, fantasy, period drama, romance, and dark magic in one of his most visually ambitious films.
The story moves through different periods as the consequences of a man’s attempt to defeat death spread across generations.
It may be less restrained than Vietnam’s best-known art-house films, but its willingness to embrace supernatural genre filmmaking makes it a fascinating example of the industry’s expanding ambitions.
🎬 40. Furie (Hai Phượng) — 2019
Director: Lê Văn Kiệt
Ngô Thanh Vân commands the screen as Hai Phượng, a former criminal whose daughter is kidnapped by a trafficking ring.
What follows is a relentless pursuit from the Mekong Delta into Ho Chi Minh City, giving the movie ample opportunity for close-quarters combat and stunt work.
The action is excellent, but the mother-daughter relationship gives the film a stronger emotional foundation than a simple revenge thriller. Furie became an international calling card for Vietnamese action cinema.
🎬 41. Ròm — 2019
Director: Trần Thanh Huy
A teenage boy survives in a poor Ho Chi Minh City neighborhood by helping residents choose numbers for an illegal lottery.
His world is energetic, dangerous, competitive, and precarious. Trần Thanh Huy films the city with restless momentum, creating a street-level perspective very different from polished tourist images of modern Vietnam.
Ròm won the New Currents Award at the Busan International Film Festival, a significant achievement for Vietnamese cinema.
🎬 42. Dreamy Eyes (Mắt Biếc) — 2019
Director: Victor Vũ
Another adaptation of a Nguyễn Nhật Ánh novel, Dreamy Eyes follows a young man’s long, often painful devotion to his childhood love.
The story moves between rural Vietnam and the city as the characters grow older and their lives diverge.
Its romantic melancholy, music, nostalgic atmosphere, and attractive cinematography made it one of Vietnam’s notable popular films of the period. It was later chosen as Vietnam’s Academy Award submission.
🎬 43. Goodbye Mother (Thưa Mẹ Con Đi) — 2019
Director: Trịnh Đình Lê Minh
After living in the United States, Văn returns to Vietnam with his boyfriend Ian for a family gathering. The trip forces him to confront expectations surrounding family responsibility, marriage, tradition, and his inability to speak openly about their relationship.
Rather than treating the family simply as villains standing in the couple’s way, Goodbye Mother finds humor, affection, misunderstanding, fear, and generational tension within the household.
It has become an especially noteworthy entry in Vietnamese LGBTQ+ cinema.
🎬 44. Dad, I’m Sorry (Bố Già) — 2021
Directors: Trấn Thành and Vũ Ngọc Đãng
Family conflict takes center stage in this enormously popular comedy-drama.
The film focuses on a working-class father who constantly sacrifices for relatives while struggling to communicate with his son. Arguments, humor, resentment, financial problems, pride, and genuine affection pile on top of one another.
Its massive domestic success demonstrated the continuing strength of family melodrama in Vietnamese popular cinema, and the film was selected to represent Vietnam at the Academy Awards.
🎬 45. The Brilliant Darkness! (Đêm Tối Rực Rỡ!) — 2022
Director: Aaron Toronto
A funeral gathering turns increasingly nightmarish when a family’s secrets, financial problems, and history of violence erupt over the course of a single night.
The colorful rituals surrounding the funeral create a striking contrast with the darkness inside the household.
Written with actor Nhã Uyên, Aaron Toronto’s tense independent drama addresses domestic abuse without disguising the ways trauma can pass from one generation to another.
🎬 46. Glorious Ashes (Tro Tàn Rực Rỡ) — 2022
Director: Bùi Thạc Chuyên
Returning to feature filmmaking after more than a decade, Bùi Thạc Chuyên adapted stories by Nguyễn Ngọc Tư into this lyrical Mekong Delta drama.
Several women live with love that is obsessive, disappointing, painful, or impossible to abandon. Fire and water repeatedly appear throughout the film, mirroring relationships that can sustain life and destroy it.
Its mixture of careful observation, striking imagery, and complicated female characters made Glorious Ashes one of the most acclaimed Vietnamese films of the early 2020s.
🎬 47. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng) — 2023
Director: Phạm Thiên Ân
After his sister-in-law dies in a motorcycle accident, Thiện travels with her young son from Saigon to the countryside for the burial and begins searching for his missing brother.
What follows is less a conventional mystery than a spiritual journey through memory, religion, landscape, family, and uncertainty.
Phạm Thiên Ân uses extraordinarily long, carefully choreographed takes to create a contemplative rhythm in which apparently ordinary encounters gradually acquire metaphysical weight.
The film won the Caméra d’Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, establishing Phạm Thiên Ân immediately as one of the most internationally prominent filmmakers to emerge from Vietnam in years.
🎬 48. The Last Wife (Người Vợ Cuối Cùng) — 2023
Director: Victor Vũ
Set during the Nguyễn dynasty, The Last Wife combines period romance with the social restrictions facing women in a hierarchical household.
A woman trapped in an unhappy marriage unexpectedly encounters a man from her past, reopening possibilities she had been forced to abandon.
Victor Vũ brings the polished visual style familiar from his other historical productions, while the central romance gives the film an accessible emotional foundation.
🎬 49. Cu Li Never Cries (Cu Li Không Bao Giờ Khóc) — 2024
Director: Phạm Ngọc Lân
An older woman returns to Vietnam carrying the ashes of her estranged former husband and a pygmy slow loris known as a cu li. Waiting for her is a younger generation preparing for a future that may unintentionally repeat elements of the past.
Shot in black and white, the film moves gently between personal memory and national history without forcing either into obvious explanations.
Phạm Ngọc Lân’s feature debut won the Best First Feature Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and represents the increasingly confident international presence of Vietnam’s independent filmmakers.
🎬 50. Việt and Nam — 2024
Director: Trương Minh Quý
Two young coal miners, Việt and Nam, are lovers working deep underground while one of them considers leaving the country.
Their intimate story gradually connects with another search: the effort to locate the remains of a father who disappeared during the war.
Filmed on 16mm, Việt and Nam treats earth, bodies, memory, migration, desire, and buried history as interconnected things. Its deliberate pace and haunting imagery make it one of the more challenging films on this list, but also one of the most distinctive.
The film was selected for the Un Certain Regard program at Cannes and further established Trương Minh Quý as a significant voice in contemporary Vietnamese art cinema.
🇻🇳 Where Should You Start With Vietnamese Cinema?
If you are completely new to Vietnamese-language film, you do not necessarily need to begin in 1959 and work your way forward.
For lyrical art-house cinema, start with The Scent of Green Papaya, When the Tenth Month Comes, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, Song Lang, or Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.
If you prefer action, try The Rebel, Blood Letter, or Furie. For historical and wartime dramas, consider The Abandoned Field, The White Silk Dress, Don’t Burn, or The Scent of Burning Grass.
Viewers drawn to contemporary family stories may prefer Floating Lives, Goodbye Mother, Dad, I’m Sorry, or The Brilliant Darkness!, while Ròm provides a grittier look at urban life.
Watching across several decades is especially rewarding because the films reveal how much Vietnam itself has changed. Rural life, urbanization, migration, gender expectations, economic reform, family relationships, memories of war, and attitudes toward sexuality all appear differently depending on when—and by whom—a film was made.
🎞️ Why Vietnamese Cinema Deserves More Attention
For international audiences, the words “Vietnam” and “film” have historically been associated disproportionately with American movies about the Vietnam War. Those films form their own significant body of cinema, but they cannot substitute for films made by Vietnamese filmmakers or stories told through Vietnamese perspectives.
Vietnamese cinema provides something fundamentally different.
Its films allow viewers to encounter war from the perspective of civilians living beneath bombing raids, experience economic reform through families whose communities are changing around them, see the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City through filmmakers who know them intimately, and enter regional landscapes ranging from the Mekong Delta to the mountains of northern Vietnam.
Just as importantly, Vietnamese movies are not all “about Vietnam” in some grand historical sense. They are about jealous lovers, difficult parents, runaway children, bad marriages, theatrical performers, debt collectors, schoolteachers, queer couples, ghosts, swordsmen, rebellious teenagers, and people trying to decide what they want from their lives.
That variety is precisely what makes exploring a national cinema so rewarding.
🎥 A Cinema Still Evolving
Vietnamese filmmaking has undergone enormous change since On the Same River appeared in 1959.
State studio productions were once the dominant form. The Đổi Mới period gradually transformed both Vietnamese society and its film industry. Overseas Vietnamese directors created new international connections during the 1980s and 1990s. Private companies expanded commercial production, while independent filmmakers increasingly entered festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Busan, Rotterdam, and Toronto.
Today, Vietnamese-language cinema encompasses everything from locally produced blockbusters to intimate international co-productions that might spend years moving through film festivals before reaching theaters.
That makes a list of 50 films necessarily incomplete.
There are many other works worth seeing, and new filmmakers continue adding to the story. But these 50 movies provide an excellent place to begin—one that stretches from foundational works of Vietnamese national cinema to some of its most exciting contemporary voices.
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📚 Sources & Further Reading
- Festival des 3 Continents — Anthology of Vietnamese Cinema
- Metrograph — Memories of a Vietnamese Cinema
- University of Hawaiʻi Center for Southeast Asian Studies — Vietnamese Cinema for Libraries Catalog
- Da Nang Asian Film Festival — The Face of Vietnam Cinema After 40 Years of Đổi Mới
- British Council Vietnam — The Season of Guavas and Vietnamese Film Heritage
- International Film Festival Rotterdam — A Time Far Past
- Film at Lincoln Center — Cyclo
- Film at Lincoln Center — Song Lang
- Film at Lincoln Center — Glorious Ashes
- Film at Lincoln Center — Cu Li Never Cries
- Film at Lincoln Center — Việt and Nam
- Festival de Cannes — Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
- The Criterion Collection — The Scent of Green Papaya and Trần Anh Hùng
- Acrobates Films — Adrift
- Yale University — Floating Lives
- CGV Vietnam — Goodbye Mother
- CGV Vietnam — Cu Li Never Cries
- Viet Film Fest — The Brilliant Darkness!
- Hanoi International Film Festival — Peach Blossom, Pho and Piano and Vietnamese Cinema
