For director Leon Le, the problem isn’t a lack of stories about Vietnam, instead it’s how they’ve been told. “Vietnamese stories have been told through a very dated, very disrespectful, ignorant lens,” he says.
His sophomore film, “Ky Nam Inn,” in competition in the features section of the Fribourg International Film Festival, returns to 1980s Saigon, following a translator, a war widow and her young son in the years after reunification.
For Le, the film is less about plot than what comes after conflict. “It’s not just a love story between a man and a woman,” he says. “It’s reconciliation between the winner and the loser, between the North and the South,” he adds. “What are we going to do now, after the war has ended, after the foreigners have left, and we have to live with each other again?”
That idea runs through the film’s structure. The central character works as a translator, adapting French classic “The Little Prince” into Vietnamese. “Once we settled on ‘The Little Prince,’ everything started clicking,” Le says. “Khang’s journey started echoing what the Little Prince is going through.” The choice also reflects the peeling back of historical layers. “We can play into the aftermath of not only what the American war left behind, but also colonization and what the French left behind.”
To build the visual identity of the film, Le, who left Vietnam at 13, draws on his own memories, still intact decades later. “I still recall a very particular afternoon when the sun was all pink, and kids were flying kites,” he says. “I can immediately transport back to that moment.” “I don’t think it’s a conscious thing,” he adds. “I just feel like that’s how it’s supposed to be.”
“Ky Nam Inn” leans into specificity, whether from the arrangement of objects in a room to the gestures of its characters, details the director says have stood out to international audiences. For Le, however, that attention is simply a natural part of the process. “That’s just basic storytelling,” he notes.
That attention to lived experience is central to how he approaches storytelling. “Who am I making this movie for?” Le ponders. “It has to be for the Vietnamese audience first.” Trying to explain cultural details for Western viewers, he adds, often distorts them. “Nobody would ever say, ‘Vietnamese people have this saying,’” he explains. “You don’t present your life like that. You don’t explain your culture to yourself.”
He also points to a broader issue. “There’s not enough stories about Vietnam for audiences to differentiate between what’s real and what’s just a version of it,” Le says. “Whatever you put out there, people are going to think it’s real.” That, he says, raises the stakes. “There’s a responsibility when you tell the story of a group of people that’s not mainstream.”
Screening in Fribourg, a festival long dedicated to global cinema beyond the Western mainstream, offers a different kind of resonance for Le. “We’re not alone,” the director says. “There are people who want to hear our voices.”
But that recognition isn’t what drives him. “With my first film and this film, I made no money whatsoever, no salary, not a single dime,” he says. “There’s no reason for me to do any of this if it’s not from love.”
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