Bao giờ cho đến tháng Mười (When the Tenth Month Comes)

Followed by a talk with Vanessa Vu

When the Tenth Month Comes is the first post-war Vietnamese film to reach a wider international audience. In Vietnam itself, it was shown in numerous small villages and is still considered a milestone in Vietnamese film history.

On the surface, Đặng Nhật Minh tells the story of Duyên, a young woman whose husband is killed in the war. To spare her family further suffering, she withholds the news of his death and becomes entangled in an increasingly elaborate web of lies – until, overwhelmed by grief and responsibility, she embarks on a journey into the world of ghosts.

Beyond the poetic imagery and the focus on rural everyday life during wartime, the film poses underlying questions of identity of particular interest to what was the newly socialist Vietnam: What remains where so much has been destroyed? How can a new, independent nation be created after all the violence? And: What to do with the traumas? (VV)

Vanessa Vu is a journalist. She was born in Eggenfelden in 1991 and spent her childhood in a home for asylum seekers in Pfarrkirchen. She has worked as an editor at ZEIT ONLINE since 2017.