Find This Film
About This Film
Siblings Đậu Xanh and Đậu Đỏ work a bus route carrying passengers from Ho Chi Minh City toward Cà Mau as Tết approaches. The road fills with people trying to get home, each carrying baggage in both the literal and emotional sense. Nguyễn Hoàng Anh’s comedy is built around one of the defining experiences of Vietnamese Lunar New Year: the return to one’s hometown for family reunion. The trip becomes chaotic, but the holiday supplies the reason every passenger accepts delay, crowding, and inconvenience. Tết is therefore not just release timing. The entire road-movie structure depends on the urgency of getting home before the new year.
Vibe
Tết —
Watch For
- Watch how each passenger embodies a different reason for returning home.
- Notice the bus as a temporary community made from strangers sharing the same holiday deadline.
- Track the contrast between comic travel mishaps and the emotional pull of family reunion.
- Pay attention to regional geography between Ho Chi Minh City and Cà Mau; the journey itself is the holiday experience.
Production Notes
Tuổi Trẻ and VnExpress both describe Về Quê Ăn Tết as a Tết road comedy produced by Ngô Thanh Vân, directed and written by Nguyễn Hoàng Anh, and centered on a bus trip from Ho Chi Minh City toward Cà Mau. VnExpress specifically notes that the siblings are unemployed as Tết approaches and begin picking up passengers desperate to return home. Contemporary Vietnamese coverage also distinguishes the film from other holiday-season releases by noting that its subject itself is family return during Tết, not merely festive marketing.
Trivia
- Nguyễn Hoàng Anh wrote and directed the film.
- Ngô Thanh Vân produced and stars as Đậu Xanh.
- Jun Phạm plays Đậu Đỏ.
- The story follows a bus journey from Ho Chi Minh City toward Cà Mau as Tết approaches.
- The film opened on the first day of Tết in February 2018.
Legacy
Going Home for Tet is valuable because it captures a holiday experience that is logistically ordinary and culturally central: the mass movement of people back to family homes before the Lunar New Year. Rather than focusing on ritual spectacle, the film turns travel itself into Tết cinema. Contemporary Vietnamese reviews explicitly recognized it as unusually faithful to the holiday theme among that year’s commercial releases.