Saigon, 1951. Mui, a 12-year-old peasant girl, is hired to work at the home of an affluent Vietnamese family as a servant. She is quietly and carefully observant of everything around her. As Mui grows into a beautiful young woman, the family falls on hard times and sends her to work as a pianist who is engaged to be married. Mui will fall in love for the first time…
The debut feature of director Tran Anh Hung stars his wife Tran Nu Yen Khe in the lead role. It won the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, making it the only Vietnamese film to date to have been nominated. With minimal dialogue and a highly realistic style, the film contemplates a world that has already disappeared, reconstructing the director’s early memories of Vietnam through rich sensory detail.
 | Tran Anh Hung Film director, screenwriter, and producer. Born in 1962 in Vietnam, Tran Anh Hung moved to France during childhood following the Vietnam War. He originally studied philosophy, but after discovering Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped, he turned to filmmaking. Tran rose to international prominence with his debut feature The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), which earned an Academy Award nomination and won two prizes at Cannes. His follow-up Cyclo (1995) won the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival. Later works such as The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000), Norwegian Wood (2010), and Eternity (2016) established him as one of contemporary cinema’s leading auteurs. Known for his highly sensory and poetic visual style, Trần rejects conventional narrative structures in favour of a cinema rooted in physicality and emotion, allowing his films to transcend language, culture, and time. Returning to French production, he directed The Taste of Things (2023), starring Juliette Binoche, for which he won the Best Director Award at Cannes. | |