On the Structural Incapacity of Vietnamese Cinema to Claim Its Place in the World
One of the more reliable signs that an industry has not yet come of age is its readiness to confuse motion with progress. Vietnamese cinema, in its current incarnation, generates a great deal of motion. Box office revenue in 2025 reached some 5.6 trillion dong, with over seventy million tickets sold, representing growth of roughly a quarter against the preceding year. Industry associations speak of records broken and ceilings shattered with the breathless enthusiasm of the newly prosperous. The government has issued resolutions. Conferences have been convened. One reads of βbreakthroughsβ and βnew erasβ with a frequency that would be encouraging were the underlying condition of the industry not quite so stubbornly unaltered. For beneath the noise of a commercially animated marketplace lies a cinema that has not, in any philosophically serious sense, found itself, and shows as yet only the most tentative signs of doing so.
The most revealing symptom of this arrested development is one that the industryβs promoters mention with remarkable frequency, apparently without registering its implications. Vietnamese cinema, at the very summit of its commercial achievements, is substantially a diaspora creation. Many of the countryβs most commercially successful directors, among them Victor Vu, Ham Tran, Timothy Linh Bui, Charlie Nguyen, and Van Kiet, were either born or raised in the United States. Vietnamese cinema became known worldwide primarily through the so-called Viet Kieu, directors born in Vietnam but formed in the West. This is a fact that is routinely celebrated in the Vietnamese press as evidence of the countryβs global connections, when it ought instead to occasion a rather more searching question: why is it that a nation of nearly a hundred million people, with a film industry now several decades old, remains so substantially dependent upon those who left it to supply the aesthetic vocabulary and technical competence that its domestic institutions have failed to cultivate? A cinema that must import its most capable practitioners from abroad is not a confident cinema. It is a cinema that has not yet trusted itself sufficiently to build the conditions in which its own talent might flourish on its own soil.
The roots of this dependence are not difficult to identify. Film producers have openly described the most troubling feature of Vietnamese cinema as the severe shortage of creative talent across the key positions of director, screenwriter, and actor, with the majority of those working in the industry not having received appropriate training. The majority of the current filmmaking workforce consists, by one account, of individuals without formal, structured training or sufficient hands-on practice environments. In production design alone, the industry is said to have a great many prop masters and occasional art directors who depend upon directors to make creative decisions on their behalf, with very few possessing the capacity to develop a comprehensive creative concept that might give a film a distinctive visual identity. This is not a minor technical deficiency. It is a civilisational one. The craft of cinema is cumulative. It is transmitted from one generation of practitioners to the next through institutions, through formal education, through the slow accretion of professional standards. Vietnam has not built those institutions with any seriousness. Only a handful of universities offer formal training in theatre and cinematography, and it was described, as recently as a few years ago, as genuinely good news that schools such as Fulbright and Hoa Sen were beginning to introduce filmmaking curricula. That the existence of a film programme at a university should be regarded as a novelty worthy of remark suggests how far the country still has to travel.
The commercial output that emerges from this environment is, predictably, of a particular and rather limited character. The dominant mode is the romantic comedy, a genre which requires of its audience precisely nothing in the way of aesthetic preparation, and of its makers only a reliable instinct for sentiment and the most rudimentary command of narrative. Horror, of the kind that resolves its frights within the conventional running time and offers no particular disturbance to the mind afterwards, has also proven commercially agreeable. One thoughtful Vietnamese producer observed that the industry in recent years has been strong in quantity and in noise, without being equally distinguished for depth, with a great many productions favouring safe and predictable storytelling under the pressure of commercial expectation. This is an accurate diagnosis, and one that the industryβs own participants have been honest enough to offer. What they have been rather less forthcoming about is the degree to which this tendency towards the safe and the predictable is not simply a commercial calculation but a rational response to an environment in which the costs of creative ambition are, in certain respects, rather high.
It is at this point that one arrives at the subject which any candid assessment of Vietnamese cinema must address, however much the prevailing social atmosphere in the country encourages a certain delicacy of expression. The creative environment in which Vietnamese filmmakers operate places upon them a set of constraints that no serious national cinema has ever flourished under. All films distributed in Vietnam must pass through a formal appraisal conducted by the Central Committee of Film Appraisal and Classification, with the principal tendencies of that body directing itself towards questions of social propriety, the management of disturbing content, and the exclusion of perspectives that might be thought to unsettle received narratives about the nationβs history and present condition. The phenomenon of self-censorship, by which directors moderate their own creative vision in anticipation of institutional objection, is sufficiently widely practised and openly acknowledged to require no elaboration. The rational filmmaker, understanding the system within which he must operate, does not write the script he most wishes to write. He writes the script most likely to survive the passage through the relevant committees without being returned to him in a condition requiring fundamental reconstruction. The result is a cinema haunted by the outlines of stories never told, of perspectives never ventured, of the human experience rendered in its most approved and untroubling configurations.
It is against this backdrop that one ought to read the curious fate of Vietnamβs most internationally distinguished recent works. Pham Thien Anβs Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, which won the CamΓ©ra dβOr at Cannes in 2023, earned only a negligible sum in domestic release, as did Bui Thac Chuyenβs Glorious Ashes, honoured at the Festival des 3 Continents the previous year. Rain on a Butterfly, which carried off the principal prize in the International Criticsβ Week at Venice in 2024, grossed less than one billion dong at home. These figures are routinely noted in the Vietnamese press as a lamentable failure of audience taste, and the absence of arthouse distribution infrastructure is correctly identified as a contributing factor. But the more uncomfortable observation is that films of genuine ambition occupy an uneasy position in Vietnamese cinema not merely because audiences have not been cultivated to receive them, but because the institutional environment in which those films must seek distribution is one that was not designed with such films in mind. The arthouse tradition, wherever it has thrived, has done so in conditions of relative creative latitude. Vietnam has not yet provided those conditions with any consistency, and the isolation of its most serious filmmakers from a domestic audience is, in part, a structural consequence of that omission.
Some Vietnamese film critics may have observed some years ago that the most apt word for describing Vietnamese cinema is βtransitional,β characterising it as an industry born decades later than the rest of the world and matured quite slowly, in which each stage of development has shown little inheritance from the previous generation and a persistent lack of diversity, with the film culture of the north entirely distinct from that of the south, and the industry of today bearing no discernible continuity with that of the 1990s. This is a remarkable thing to say about a country whose cinematic tradition is now more than a century old, and its accuracy has not meaningfully diminished in the years since it was offered. A cinema without continuity is a cinema without memory, and a cinema without memory cannot accumulate the kind of cultural authority that allows it to address the world on its own terms rather than in borrowed voices.
Pham Thien Anβs Camera dβOr at Cannes arrived precisely thirty years after Tran Anh Hung claimed the same prize with The Scent of Green Papaya. That thirty-year interval is not a gap that was being quietly filled. It was an absence. South Korea, during those same thirty years, was constructing the institutional apparatus of a serious national cinema with deliberate and patient intelligence, liberalising the conditions under which its directors could work, investing in the formation of a genuine critical culture, and exporting its graduates to the worldβs best film schools before recalling them to a domestic industry capable of absorbing what they had learnt. The result was not Parasite by accident. It was Parasite by design. Vietnam has produced the aspiration without the design, the resolution without the reckoning, and the box office record without the cultural foundation that might give such records any enduring significance.
One is reminded, surveying the landscape of Vietnamese cinema at its present moment of commercial vigour and structural fragility, of a large house that has been enthusiastically repainted without anyone having thought to attend to its foundations. The exterior presents well. The figures are gratifying. The resolutions are in order. And yet a cinema that remains dependent upon its diaspora for its most capable practitioners, that cannot reliably train or retain its own talent, that has not yet constructed the critical and institutional infrastructure that allows serious work to find its audience at home, and that operates within creative constraints which it finds it more comfortable not to examine too directly, is a cinema that has mistaken the appearance of maturity for the substance of it. That substance, if it is ever to arrive, will require rather more than another record-breaking Lunar New Year at the box office.ββββββββββββββββ














