It’s been fifty years since the Vietnam War ended.
Hundreds of films have tried to tell that story. But how many of them were told by women?
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket shaped how the world remembers the war in Vietnam: soldiers, battlefields, fire, tanks.
As Svetlana Alexievich once wrote: We are all captives of “men's” notions and “men's” sense of war.
We think we’ve exhausted the war on film. But one lens is always missing: the female one.
Maybe it’s as simple as this: there are always more male directors than female.
I wonder: how different would the Vietnam War look when seen through the lens of women? How do they perceive that war? What do they choose to tell about it? And what stories still remain in the shadows?
I set out to find answers in conversations with Vietnamese women who are telling stories of war: a documentary filmmaker raised among postwar tales in a once-divided land, a photobook author who is the daughter of a fighter pilot, and the producer of the first Vietnamese film festival in the UK.
“...in that war, a human fate was nothing more than a speck of dust swept along by the tide of history”
Documentary film director Doan Hong Le was born in 1974, a year before the war ended. She grew up in Quang Tri, in a central Vietnamese family that had once relocated north.
When her family returned to the Central region and settled in a Southern neighborhood, the children there refused to accept her. To them, she was “a northerner.” Their parents had lost jobs, endured the upheaval of 1975. The divide between north and south ran so deep, even their children carried its weight.
At school, history was told differently. That dissonance haunted her with a single question: why? It’s the question that has guided every film she’s made since.
Each film is a fragment, a small answer filling in the silence of a larger story.
“My films show how ordinary people, ordinary lives lived through war and after it ended,” she says.
“In that war, a human fate was nothing more than a speck of dust swept along by the tide of history. Choices could be made, but decisions were never theirs.”
Her father had been a war correspondent, returning home in 1968. “Fifty years later, right before he passed, he was still haunted by nightmares. He dreamt of American helicopters descending, of the terror of a reporter hiding in bunkers under roaring bombs. He screamed in his sleep and the whole neighborhood could hear.
Half a century later, the scars remain. Memories, emotions, wounds etched into the way people live, the way they carry themselves.
Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, published in 1992, was one of the first books to show the grief of war: that not every soldier returned heroic.
Many ARVN soldiers when I approached them refused to share their stories at all, convinced there was nothing worth telling. “Nothing glorious,” they said. Better to bury the memory.
In Vietnam, those conversations rarely surface. Soldiers must appear strong. To speak of PTSD, to reveal pain, to admit damage—that would be seen as weakness.”
Le’s film Người Mẹ (Mother, 2022) follows Dep, a woman who spent forty years searching for her daughter lost during Operation Babylift. One of the rare Vietnamese films to tell the war through such a lens: not a soldier, not a hero, but an ordinary person. A mother.
Doan Hong Le’s films converge in one emotion: thương. A word that folds sorrow, compassion, and tenderness into one. “Every time I look back at our history, I feel it,” she says. “I wonder why Vietnamese people had to endure so much pain.”
“In their stories lay not just victories, but the tender humanity of men who soared, suffered, triumphed, and returned home...”
Tu Phuong Thao is the daughter of Colonel Tu De—a fighter pilot and member of the Quyet Thang (Victory-minded) squadron, who flew one of the last missions before Vietnam’s reunification.
Her childhood was bound to the roar of jet engines, to summers spent trailing her father through airbases, watching up close how fighter pilots lived, trained. “When I was ten, my entire summer break meant living on the airfield. Depending on my father’s assignments, I would go with him to bases across Vietnam—Phan Rang, Da Nang, Thanh Hoa.
Years later, when I worked on my first book, I retraced those places of my childhood. Some were still familiar, others had changed completely. That’s when I realized: my whole life was inseparable from the air force.”
She calls it the environment that nurtured her. “The environment in which a person grows up will nurture them through everything they absorb from it. I grew up in memory of war and history,” said Từ Phương Thảo.
It was love, together with childhood memories and the proud image of her pilot father, that led Tu Phuong Thao and photographer Ngo Nhat Hoang to the nine-year journey of creating 108 Vietnamese Combat Pilots—a nearly 300-page bilingual book with more than 600 archival photographs, piecing together a collective memory on paper.
These portraits, tenderly captured in the pilots’ own homes, form an unbreakable bridge between past and present. "When visiting the veterans’ homes and poring over their albums it felt as though we were touching their memories. Some pilots, having long retreated from public life, hesitated to appear – preferring to preserve the heroic image of their youth, or bearing silent scars from incidents faced in the line of duty. It took much persuasion to bring them back into the light," recalls Tu Phuong Thao.
"Proud to be a daughter of an Air Force officer, I was blessed with both an understanding of their world and an artist’s instinct.
Through worn epaulettes, tattered helmets, and heavy medals pressed against ageing uniforms, we glimpsed their undying spirit. Their eyes, forever searching distant skies, would brighten anew when recounting flights of daring, of joy, of sorrow.
In their stories lay not just victories, but the tender humanity of men who soared, suffered, triumphed, and returned home to fields, to old homes, to waiting grandchildren."
“What can a woman tell that a man can’t?”
Tuyet Van Huynh is the co-founder and curator of Star Nhà Ease — the first and only Vietnamese Film Festival in the UK.
A big part of Tuyet’s journey with Star Nhà Ease has been about the absence of stories.
The image of the Vietnam War on screen—at least in the UK—has mostly come from Hollywood. Explosions, American soldiers, jungles, and battlefields.
Throughout their two screening seasons, the British Chinese-Vietnamese producer still chooses to show Vietnamese films about the war. Because war is inescapable for Vietnamese people. It lingers, and it continues to affect how we live our lives. It has shaped us as a nation and as a people.
But that doesn’t mean it always has to be the central focus. For Tuyet, “the question isn’t whether we stop telling stories about the war, but how we choose to tell them — and from which perspective.
It’s about asking: what hasn’t been said yet?
There’s a certain emotional depth and tenderness that a woman can bring to storytelling.
But it’s not about asking, ‘what can a woman tell that a man can’t?’ or vice versa. The point is to stay open to how these stories are told, rather than shutting them into categories of “male” or “female” stories. The difference is that women historically haven’t been given the space or opportunity to create, so we haven’t had enough female-told stories to engage with.
So yes, we need more stories by women. Not just “female stories,” but female-told stories. That’s what’s missing.”
The term Vietnam War is the common English name for the conflict, but in Vietnam it is known as the American War (or Resistance War against America), reflecting the Vietnamese perspective of the war as a struggle for national liberation against American intervention.