For director Leon Le, the problem isn’t a lack of stories about Vietnam, but rather how stories about Vietnam have been told. “The story of Vietnam has been told through a very outdated, very disrespectful, ignorant lens,” he says.
His second film, Kai Nam Yin, which was shown in the Friborg International Film Festival’s feature competition section, returns to 1980s Saigon and follows a translator, a war widow, and her young son in the years following unification.
For Lee, the film is less about the plot and more about what happens after the conflict. “This is not just a love story between a man and a woman,” he says. “It is a reconciliation between winners and losers, north and south,” he added. “What will we do now after the war is over and the foreigners leave and we have to live together again?”
That idea runs through the structure of this film. The central character works as a translator, adapting the French classic “The Little Prince” into Vietnamese. “Once I got The Little Prince, everything started falling into place,” says Lee. “Kan’s journey began to resonate with what the Little Prince was experiencing.” This choice also reflects the peeling back of historical layers. “We can engage not only with the legacy of America’s wars, but also with the aftermath of colonization and the legacy of France.”
To construct the film’s visual identity, Lee, who left Vietnam at the age of 13, drew from his own memories, which remain intact decades later. “I still remember that special afternoon when the sun was pink and the kids were flying kites,” he says. “You can instantly be transported back to that moment.” “I don’t think it’s a conscious thing,” he added. “I just feel like that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
The director says that “Kinnam Inn” has attention to detail, from the placement of objects in the room to the characters’ gestures, and that these details have attracted the attention of international audiences. But for Le, that attention is a natural part of the process. “It’s just basic storytelling,” he points out.
Attention to lived experience is central to his approach to storytelling. “Who am I making this movie for?” Lu muses. “It has to be for the Vietnamese audience first.” He added that trying to explain cultural details for Western audiences often distorts the content. “No one will say, ‘The Vietnamese have this proverb,'” he explains. “You don’t describe your life that way. You don’t explain your culture to yourself.”
He also points to broader issues. “There aren’t enough stories about Vietnam for viewers to distinguish between the real thing and just a version of it,” Lee says. “No matter what you put out there, people will think it’s real.” That increases the risk, he says. “Telling the stories of non-mainstream groups of people comes with a responsibility.”
The screening at Fribourg, a festival that has long been dedicated to global films that go beyond the Western mainstream, gave Le Le Lou a different kind of resonance. “We are not alone,” the director says. “There are people who want to hear our voices.”
But that realization isn’t what drives him. “In my first film and this one, I didn’t make any money or any salary,” he says. “There’s no reason for me to do this unless it’s out of love.”
