Vibe
Vinh and Phúc grow up as close friends with Miền in a small central Vietnamese community. Vinh quietly loves Miền but hesitates to confess his feelings, while the more outgoing Phúc encourages him—only to discover that he and Miền are falling in love with each other. Their triangle grows more painful as the friends leave childhood behind. After a decisive rupture, Phúc departs the village, and the people he leaves behind build lives in his absence. Years later he returns to find that time has changed the meaning of love, loyalty, sacrifice, and family for all three of them. The film moves between different stages of their lives, turning first love into a story about the choices people continue to live with long after youth has passed.
Watch for
- The friendship underneath the triangle: The key distinction from a conventional love triangle is that Vinh and Phúc’s bond predates their romantic rivalry. Their choices therefore carry two kinds of loss at once: the risk of losing Miền and the risk of damaging a formative friendship.
- Phú Yên as remembered Vietnam: The locations are selected for their ability to evoke the late-1980s through 1990s without excessive digital reconstruction. Fields, floodwater, school roads, village homes, and natural light give the film its emotional geography.
- Child and adult casting: The story crosses multiple age periods, so watch how the production uses younger and older performers, repeated gestures, props, spaces, and relationships to make the characters feel continuous even as the cast changes.
- The move beyond innocence: The adaptation deliberately includes sexuality, pregnancy, separation, and single motherhood. These elements push the Nguyễn Nhật Ánh coming-of-age mode into more explicitly adult emotional territory while preserving the author’s focus on memory and regret.
Production notes
The film was produced by HKFilm with CJ HK Entertainment and additional partners, directed by Trịnh Đình Lê Minh, and written by Nhi Bùi and Đỗ Hoa Trà. Nguyễn Trinh Hoan served as director of photography and producer, with Chapavich Temnitikul composing the score. HKFilm lists a 135-minute runtime, an official release date of November 1, 2024, CJ CGV as distributor, and a reported box office of VND45 billion. Promotional materials also document special screenings beginning October 25. Location work was central to the production. Trịnh Đình Lê Minh said the team spent months surveying sites that could still suggest central Vietnam from the 1990s into the early 2000s, ultimately finding Phú Yên especially suited to the film’s nostalgic tone. The movie adapted Nguyễn Nhật Ánh’s 2016 novel and retained the story’s movement across several periods of the characters’ lives. It also became the only Vietnamese feature competing in the feature category at the 7th Hanoi International Film Festival and was selected as the festival’s opening film. At the closing awards, Ngọc Xuân received the Promising Young Actor award for her performance as Miền. The festival context matters because it placed a mainstream literary adaptation in a formal international showcase rather than limiting the film’s significance to domestic box office.
Trivia
- The film adapts Nguyễn Nhật Ánh’s 2016 novel, which had reached at least its 20th printing by 2024 according to Nhà Xuất Bản Trẻ.
- Director Trịnh Đình Lê Minh and the team spent months searching for locations that still carried the atmosphere of central Vietnam in the 1990s and early 2000s; Phú Yên became the principal visual anchor.
- The story spans four broad stages from 1987 to 2000, requiring the production to represent the central trio at different ages.
- Ngày xưa có một chuyện tình was the only Vietnamese film in the feature competition at HANIFF VII and was chosen as the festival’s opening film.
- Ngọc Xuân won HANIFF VII’s Promising Young Actor award for playing Miền.
Legacy
Ngày xưa có một chuyện tình extends the modern cycle of Nguyễn Nhật Ánh adaptations while demonstrating that the author’s screen presence does not have to belong exclusively to Victor Vũ. Trịnh Đình Lê Minh brought his own interests in intimacy, family, sexuality, and queer-adjacent sensitivity from earlier work into a more mainstream romantic framework. The film’s reception was not uniformly enthusiastic, but its formal recognition at HANIFF—opening the festival, representing Vietnam in feature competition, and earning Ngọc Xuân the Promising Young Actor prize—gave the adaptation an identity beyond franchise familiarity. Its longer-term value may lie in how it preserves a specific kind of rural temporal memory. The film is built around Phú Yên landscapes and a late-20th-century central Vietnamese atmosphere in which school, family reputation, economic limitation, and physical distance shape romance as much as personality does. It sits at the intersection of literary adaptation, popular romance, regional landscape cinema, and the continuing screen life of Nguyễn Nhật Ánh.