Chroniques vietnamiennes

2005Movie

DocumentaryHistoryFamily

Thi Bach is of Vietnamese origin. She arrived in France at the age of 15 in 1975 and has lived there ever since. Guillaume Mazeline is the grandson of André, an officer in the French Expeditionary Corps who fought in the Indochina War between 1948 and 1950. In May 2005, the two of them took a trip to Ho Chi Minh City, where Thi Bach grew up, then to Hanoi and the surrounding countryside, where André spent two years. They went in search of traces of their past. Extending the narrative, the Vietnamese people they meet talk about their memories of the war and their hopes and concerns about the evolution of their society. This Vietnam and that of the Indochina War are the contexts for the filmmakers' questioning. Both revisit their identities: that of a grandson confronted with his grandfather's colonial experience, and that of a Vietnamese woman who has now become a French citizen.