Diem Ha Le’s feature debut is a missive from a territory which catches the eye of the Western viewer much too rarely, except for the short-lived upsurge of cinematic manifestos produced during the Vietnam War. The term “missive,” however, doesn’t fully do justice to the director’s furious energy, to her outrage at a situation where a nation is left to its own devices, abandoned at the difficult crossroads between the official communist ideology and the unstoppable influence of capitalism, especially in its cultural form, which insinuates itself in communities that are unprepared to evaluate it in a sufficiently nuanced way. The context of the country, torn between tradition and several contradictory forms of modernity, is encapsulated in the protagonist’s destiny – Di, a 12-year-old girl from a village in northern Vietnam, where poverty and alcoholism are rampant, but also where the desire to live a different life than the previous generations simmers in young people’s hearts. An ancestral tradition – the kidnapping of the bride-to-be by her man on the night of the Lunar New Year celebrations in order to force the families to accept the marriage – seems to seal Di’s fate, but the protagonist and the filmmaker form a tacit alliance filled with contradictions and conflicts, which nevertheless leads to the girl’s gradual self-affirmation, under the camera’s alternatingly encouraging and reproving eye. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)