Áo lua Hà Dông

A very powerful story about life in the face of turmoil.

As a Vietnam veteran, this movie showed some insight into the struggles facing the Vietnamese people for decades.

Love comes to two people at the bottom of the social structure in Vietnam in the 1950's. A silk dress comes to symbolize how this love grows.

Two daughters can't go to school beyond 6th grade unless they wear a white dress.

I suspect most viewers will shed tears watching the joy and challenges facing this family.

This movie has been criticized within some circles, for good reason. There is a layer of propaganda or politics that comes out repeatedly. However, I see this as a reflection of the story itself as well as the times it is reflecting. Beyond the politics is a great story well worth watching.

The movie is a tool for propaganda for the Vietnamese Communism. With many scenes were carefully and selectively chosen for its political purpose. The movie has many scenes that are not to believe; the last scene with the child held the white dress as a sign of surrendering; yet the Americans/South Viet Nam still dropped the bombs to the civilians. It just was not true. This can be labeled as "history is written by the winners"; and it is bias.

The movie can also written different where the impoverished children were rescued and live somewhere in the US, came back to celebrate their Motherland.

I have traveled to Vietnam many times for business and pleasure and I am sort of familiar with the pain and suffering that ordinary people went through before the war, during the war and many years afterward. The White Silk Dress is about a love story between two very poor servants who have high values even though they are struggling to survive. For a poor country with limited means, this movie portrayed the events well and in my opinion not slanted towards one side or the other politically. Vietnamese people are very conservative when it comes to nudity and I was surprised to see scenes of bare breasts which in this movie was part of the plot and well done. I enjoyed the movie very much and definitely recommend it.

One of the most uplifting movies ever made by any director. This is not just another war story from Vietnam, not a depiction of an impoverished family, not a tale of a mysterious white silk dress (a traditional 'ao dai', the only valuable property they own), not a coming of age story of the peasant's daughters, nor an insight into Vietnamese culture. No, this movie is all of those things in one plus a wonderful ode to all Vietnamese women: to their resilience, determination, sagacity, and beauty. The story is brilliantly told, shot, scored, and does have a few surprising turns to keep you in your seat for its two hours and twenty minutes length.

This film is truly a great accomplishment for Vietnam and the Vietnamese-American director. Despite having a budget of roughly only two million USD, it is the most expensive film ever produced by the country.

The film is able to capture the authentic essence of Vietnamese culture through the story and themes; mainly that of suffering and respect for parents. The story follows the life of a poor hunchbacked man and a servant woman from North Vietnam who experience suffering through war and living in poverty.

The film is heart wrenching as the painful scenes are not over dramatized or unbelievable. You really grieve for the family, and even life at points. This film certainly has no happy ending because it remains true to the lives of many Vietnamese people.

The film's shortcomings are mainly technical issues, which are due to the small film industry in Vietnam and the inexperienced production company. Despite those problems, the cinematography is beautiful and the film has many impressive scenes without the use of CGI or special effects.

This film was incredibly hard for me to obtain. As of summer 2008, there is no commercial release in Vietnam (due to rampant pirating), NA or Europe. Only Taiwan has released a DVD. This was the one I purchased and I was hoping the distributor would do a good job of presenting the film, but I was disappointed. The DVD presents the film in a matted 4:3 screen and the transfer is quite poor. You would think the film was much older based on the quality. The authentic DVD wasn't cheap either, so it was quite disappointing.

This film deserves to be seen by many and hopefully we will see some release in the future that does justice to the original material.