Narratives of the Natural World in Vietnamese Postwar Movies (1986–2020)

This essay analyzes three innovative Vietnamese films that are different from mainstream movies about the Vietnam War, between the beginning of the Đổi Mới (There Is No Horizon, 1986) or Reform period in Vietnam (The Survivor of the Laughing Forest, 1991), and the present when Vietnam has embraced globalization (The Legend of Quan Tien, 2020). All three films are set in the Trường Sơn tropical primeval forest, an essential location for transferring troops and food from the North to the South in Vietnam’s war against the US. For each phase, I analyze how the film directors choose a point of view for dialogue questioning the narratives of previous revolutionary films that featured nature during wartime, and how that point of view is affected by their creative personality and the socio-political circumstances of their period. Using discourse theory along with eco-ethics, ecocriticism, and postmodernism, the essay analyzes the small narratives and micro-histories in these films, the stories that have been obscured, ignored, or distorted by dominant discourses on ecology in earlier Vietnamese art films.