Nổi gió is one of the defining revolutionary features about a Vietnamese family split across opposing sides of war. Vân is active in the revolutionary movement, while her younger brother Phương returns as an officer of the Republic of Vietnam. Their reunion immediately turns political division into domestic rupture. The conflict is not abstract because the siblings share memory, kinship, and emotional history even when their loyalties have become incompatible. Huy Thành adapts Đào Hồng Cẩm’s stage play and builds the film around that contradiction. Vân’s suffering is extreme: her child is killed, she is imprisoned and tortured, and she later pretends to be mentally unstable as part of resistance activity. The film’s ideological alignment is unmistakably North Vietnamese, but its dramatic durability comes from the choice to embody national division in siblings rather than anonymous opposing forces. Thụy Vân’s performance gives the work its emotional severity, while Thế Anh’s Phương represents the painful possibility that family affection can survive even when politics make coexistence impossible. VnExpress notes that the film became the first feature to receive the Golden Lotus at the inaugural Vietnam Film Festival in 1970 and identifies it, following official film history, as the first Vietnamese feature about southern resistance to the United States and Republic of Vietnam forces.
Vibe
Synopsis
Vân participates in the revolutionary struggle in southern Vietnam and has already endured severe personal losses when her younger brother Phương returns to the village. She initially welcomes him but rejects him after discovering that he serves as an officer in the Republic of Vietnam military. Their opposing loyalties turn family reunion into confrontation. Vân is later arrested and brutally tortured, and her child is killed. She survives by appearing to lose her sanity, using that assumed condition to continue resistance activity even inside confinement. Phương must confront the fact that the political side he serves has inflicted violence on his own family. The film follows the siblings through a conflict in which national division and blood relationship become impossible to separate.
Nổi gió is one of the defining revolutionary features about a Vietnamese family split across opposing sides of war. Vân is active in the revolutionary movement, while her younger brother Phương returns as an officer of the Republic of Vietnam. Their reunion immediately turns political division into domestic rupture. The conflict is not abstract because the siblings share memory, kinship, and emotional history even when their loyalties have become incompatible. Huy Thành adapts Đào Hồng Cẩm’s stage play and builds the film around that contradiction. Vân’s suffering is extreme: her child is killed, she is imprisoned and tortured, and she later pretends to be mentally unstable as part of resistance activity. The film’s ideological alignment is unmistakably North Vietnamese, but its dramatic durability comes from the choice to embody national division in siblings rather than anonymous opposing forces. Thụy Vân’s performance gives the work its emotional severity, while Thế Anh’s Phương represents the painful possibility that family affection can survive even when politics make coexistence impossible. VnExpress notes that the film became the first feature to receive the Golden Lotus at the inaugural Vietnam Film Festival in 1970 and identifies it, following official film history, as the first Vietnamese feature about southern resistance to the United States and Republic of Vietnam forces.
Watch for
- Watch how the sibling relationship carries the political argument; the film makes national division painful because opposing sides exist inside one family rather than at a safe distance.
- Notice Thụy Vân’s physical transformation under imprisonment and torture, where endurance is expressed through performance rather than abstract descriptions of sacrifice.
- Pay attention to Phương’s position as a Republic of Vietnam officer, which gives the film a specific dramatic face for political division instead of using only anonymous enemy figures.
- Observe how the stage-play origins remain visible in confrontational scenes and performance intensity, while cinema expands the conflict into village, prison, and wartime spaces.
Production notes
Nổi gió was adapted from the play of the same name by Đào Hồng Cẩm and directed by Huy Thành in 1966. VnExpress’s archival review identifies Thụy Vân as Vân and Thế Anh as Phương and describes the feature as the first Vietnamese revolutionary film to focus on the struggle in the South against the United States and the Republic of Vietnam. The movie was produced within the state-studio system at a time when northern Vietnamese cinema was developing a more sustained feature-film language under wartime conditions. Its combination of stage-derived confrontation and filmic space helped create a direct, performance-centered style. The film’s institutional status was cemented in 1970 when it won the first Golden Lotus awarded to a feature at the inaugural Vietnam Film Festival. Later retrospectives by Vietnam Feature Film Studio and VnExpress continued to treat the film as one of the studio’s enduring classics. That long institutional life is important provenance because it shows the work moving from contemporary wartime drama to a canonical object of national film history.
Trivia
- Nổi gió won the first Golden Lotus awarded for a feature film at the inaugural Vietnam Film Festival in 1970.
- The film adapts a stage play by Đào Hồng Cẩm, and its intense sibling confrontations retain some of the dramatic concentration of theatrical writing.
- VnExpress, citing official Vietnamese film history, identifies it as the first revolutionary feature about resistance in the South during the anti-American war.
- Thụy Vân’s role as Vân became one of the defining performances of her career and is frequently highlighted in retrospectives of classic Vietnamese cinema.
- Director Huy Thành later received State Prize recognition for a body of work that included Nổi gió, reinforcing the film’s institutional importance beyond its original release.
Legacy
Nổi gió remains a major work of revolutionary Vietnamese cinema because it established a durable dramatic model: national division experienced through family. Later films would return repeatedly to siblings, spouses, parents, and children separated by political allegiance, but Rising Storm gave that structure an especially direct form. Its Golden Lotus at the first Vietnam Film Festival turned it into an institutional benchmark, and the performances of Thụy Vân and Thế Anh became part of the star history of the state-studio era. Contemporary viewers should distinguish that importance from neutrality. The film was created within North Vietnam’s revolutionary cultural system and presents the conflict through that ideological framework. Yet acknowledging its perspective does not diminish its formal achievement. The work understands that political division becomes emotionally powerful on screen when the audience can feel the cost in intimate relationships. It helps explain the evolution from foundational state features such as Chung một dòng sông toward the more psychologically layered war and postwar cinema of Hải Ninh and Đặng Nhật Minh. Its legacy is not simply that it represented a cause, but that it found a family structure capable of making that cause cinematic.
Find This Film
Search “Nổi gió” or “Rising Storm” with Huy Thành, Thụy Vân, and Thế Anh. VnExpress’s film-library review and Vietnam Feature Film Studio retrospectives provide strong synopsis, award, and institutional-history provenance.