Cha và con và… uses a loose network of young men and women in late-1990s Saigon to examine desire, friendship, class, masculinity, and the economic pressures shaping adulthood. Vũ, a photography student from the countryside, becomes fascinated by Thăng, a charismatic club dancer whose confidence and mobility seem to offer an alternative to Vũ’s uncertainty. Around them are lovers, sex workers, family expectations, and schemes for making money in a city transforming rapidly under Đổi Mới. Phan Đăng Di resists a single protagonist’s coming-of-age arc. Instead, relationships form and dissolve across apartments, clubs, river journeys, family spaces, and informal economies. Sexuality is important but rarely announced as identity. Vũ’s attraction to Thăng remains part of a wider confusion about intimacy, adulthood, and social possibility. The film’s period setting matters because the late 1990s were a moment when urban consumer culture and new private opportunities expanded without eliminating older family obligations. Berlin selected the film for its 2015 Competition, an unusually prominent platform for a Vietnamese feature. Its achievement is not plot density but atmosphere: the characters seem to be trying on possible lives while the city around them is changing faster than they can define what they want.
Vibe
Synopsis
Vũ leaves his rural home to study photography in Saigon and becomes close to Thăng, a confident young man who works in nightlife and moves through the city with an ease Vũ lacks. Their friendship develops an undercurrent of desire that Vũ does not know how to name. Other relationships intersect with theirs, including women involved in sex work and young people trying to secure money or independence. A government family-planning incentive and pressures from parents introduce another set of choices about bodies and adulthood. Vũ eventually returns toward his family while carrying new uncertainties about sexuality, friendship, and the kind of life available to him. The film favors fragments of experience over a tightly closed plot.
Cha và con và… uses a loose network of young men and women in late-1990s Saigon to examine desire, friendship, class, masculinity, and the economic pressures shaping adulthood. Vũ, a photography student from the countryside, becomes fascinated by Thăng, a charismatic club dancer whose confidence and mobility seem to offer an alternative to Vũ’s uncertainty. Around them are lovers, sex workers, family expectations, and schemes for making money in a city transforming rapidly under Đổi Mới. Phan Đăng Di resists a single protagonist’s coming-of-age arc. Instead, relationships form and dissolve across apartments, clubs, river journeys, family spaces, and informal economies. Sexuality is important but rarely announced as identity. Vũ’s attraction to Thăng remains part of a wider confusion about intimacy, adulthood, and social possibility. The film’s period setting matters because the late 1990s were a moment when urban consumer culture and new private opportunities expanded without eliminating older family obligations. Berlin selected the film for its 2015 Competition, an unusually prominent platform for a Vietnamese feature. Its achievement is not plot density but atmosphere: the characters seem to be trying on possible lives while the city around them is changing faster than they can define what they want.
Watch for
- Watch Vũ’s photography as both profession and emotional distance; the camera within the story lets him observe people he is drawn to before he can articulate his own desire.
- Notice how Thăng’s bodily confidence contrasts with Vũ’s hesitancy, creating erotic tension without requiring the film to turn either man into a fixed identity category.
- Pay attention to the late-1990s setting, where nightlife, money-making schemes, family planning, and rural-to-urban movement reveal a society adjusting to new economic possibilities.
- Observe how river travel and returns to the countryside interrupt Saigon’s nightlife, reminding viewers that the characters’ urban freedoms remain connected to family and regional origins.
Production notes
Big Father, Small Father and Other Stories was written and directed by Phan Đăng Di and became the first Vietnamese film selected for the main Competition at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2015. The Berlinale World Cinema Fund supported the project with €40,000 and records its international co-production development. Acrobates Films lists the cast, crew, and festival history, while European production partner Volya Films documents the project within a network spanning Vietnam and several European partners. Phan set the film in Saigon around the late 1990s, drawing on a moment of rapid social and economic change rather than filming an undifferentiated contemporary city. The production required nightclubs, river locations, modest apartments, rural spaces, and a visual approach that could move among multiple characters without making the ensemble feel episodic. The film’s Berlin premiere placed Vietnamese independent cinema on one of the world’s most visible competitive stages and followed Phan’s earlier Cannes Critics’ Week breakthrough with Bi, Don’t Be Afraid!.
Trivia
- The film competed for the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlinale, a rare main-competition placement for a Vietnamese feature and a major milestone in Phan Đăng Di’s career.
- The Berlinale World Cinema Fund provided €40,000 in support, continuing the international development route that had become important for independent Vietnamese production.
- The story is set in late-1990s Saigon rather than the year of production, allowing the film to examine early Đổi Mới-era urban change from historical distance.
- Photography is built into Vũ’s character, giving the film a recurring motif of looking, framing, and keeping emotional experience at one remove.
- Acrobates Films and Volya Films document a wide international festival life after Berlin, confirming the feature’s circulation far beyond its domestic release context.
Legacy
Big Father, Small Father and Other Stories strengthened the international standing of Vietnamese independent cinema by reaching the Berlinale’s main Competition without reshaping itself into an easily marketable national allegory. Its story remains diffuse, sensual, and uncertain, qualities that mirror the young characters’ relationship to a rapidly changing Saigon. The film is also an important queer text even though it avoids identity labels and conventional coming-out structure. Vũ’s attraction to Thăng exists beside class difference, family expectation, artistic ambition, and economic insecurity, suggesting that sexuality is one part of a broader struggle to imagine adulthood. Phan Đăng Di’s placement of the story in the late 1990s gives the film historical value as a portrait of early urban transformation after market reforms. Within his career, it expands the sensory domestic world of Bi, Don’t Be Afraid! into a wider social network of clubs, rivers, workers, families, and artists. Its importance lies partly in that freedom: the country’s cinematic present can be messy, erotic, urban, and formally open-ended while still carrying the pressures of family and history underneath.
Find This Film
Search the English or Vietnamese title with Phan Đăng Di and 2015. Berlinale World Cinema Fund records provide strong production provenance, while Acrobates Films and Volya Films maintain exact-film pages with cast, crew, synopsis, and festival history.