Ròm

Ròm throws itself into the alleys of Ho Chi Minh City with the speed and instability of its teenage protagonist. Ròm survives by acting as a runner and lottery-number tipster for residents of a poor apartment community, turning superstition, debt, and hope into an informal economy. His rival Phúc offers competing numbers, and their contest is not simply adolescent bravado: both boys depend on adults’ desperation for money and belonging. Trần Thanh Huy’s camera races through alleys, rooftops, staircases, markets, and traffic, often tilted or moving with bodies that have no secure place to stop. That kinetic style makes poverty feel structural rather than picturesque. Residents gamble because the lottery offers one of the few imaginable shortcuts out of debt, even as repeated losses deepen their vulnerability. Ròm himself is not outside the system; he is both exploited by adults and capable of exploiting them. The film spent years in development and became the first Vietnamese feature to win Busan’s New Currents Award in 2019. Its later domestic release turned it into a significant commercial event as well. Ròm’s importance lies in this combination of festival energy and popular immediacy: it presents marginalized urban life with a genre-like propulsion rarely associated with Vietnamese social realism.

Synopsis

Ròm is a teenage boy living around a deteriorating apartment complex in Ho Chi Minh City. He earns money by helping residents buy lottery tickets and by predicting lucky numbers, competing with another boy, Phúc, for customers and status. The adults around them are burdened by debt and increasingly desperate for a winning number that might transform their lives. Ròm pursues information from spiritual and informal sources while trying to keep his own precarious position in the neighborhood. Rivalry, gambling losses, creditors, and redevelopment pressure push the community toward crisis. The film follows Ròm through the city at relentless speed, showing a child surviving inside an economy built on other people’s hope and desperation.

Watch for

• Watch the frequent canted framing and racing camera movement, which make stairs, alleys, rooftops, and streets feel unstable even before the story’s financial pressures intensify.
• Notice how lottery gambling functions as both community ritual and predatory economy; residents share hopes and information even while losses deepen individual debt.
• Pay attention to Ròm and Phúc as mirrors rather than simple hero and villain, since both boys survive by selling certainty to adults who badly want to believe them.
• Observe how redevelopment and housing insecurity sit behind the immediate lottery plot, giving the apartment community another reason to seek miraculous financial escape.

Production notes

Trần Thanh Huy developed Ròm over roughly seven years, expanding material first explored in his short film 16:30. The feature premiered in the New Currents competition at the 2019 Busan International Film Festival and won the section’s top New Currents Award. Busan’s jury highlighted the film’s energy, performances, and use of real locations, while VnExpress reported the win as the first time a Vietnamese film had taken Busan’s highest New Currents honor. The production depended on dense Ho Chi Minh City locations and a visual approach that could follow young performers through narrow, crowded spaces with unusual speed. After festival success, the film’s domestic path was complicated by regulatory issues connected to an earlier festival submission, but it ultimately opened commercially in Vietnam in September 2020. CGV’s release page lists a 79-minute theatrical version and C18 classification. The movie’s production history therefore spans independent development, international festival recognition, domestic regulatory friction, and successful theatrical exhibition.

Trivia

• Ròm won the New Currents Award at Busan in 2019, becoming the first Vietnamese feature to take the festival’s principal prize for emerging Asian filmmakers.
• The project grew out of Trần Thanh Huy’s earlier short 16:30 and required approximately seven years of development before the feature reached audiences.
• Busan’s jury specifically praised the film’s youthful energy, performances, and use of real locations, qualities that are visible in its constantly mobile street-level style.
• CGV lists the Vietnamese theatrical version at 79 minutes and records its September 2020 domestic release after the film’s earlier international festival success.
• The film’s local exhibition history included regulatory complications, making its eventual commercial release an important part of the production and distribution record.

Legacy

Ròm is a major modern Vietnamese film because it broke down the perceived boundary between festival cinema and aggressive popular energy. Its Busan victory brought international prestige, yet the movie does not resemble a restrained prestige drama. It is loud, tilted, fast, physically exhausting, and built from young bodies moving through overcrowded urban space. That style helped redefine what Vietnamese social realism could look like. The film also places lottery culture and informal labor at the center of its class analysis, showing how hope itself becomes a commodity when secure routes out of poverty are limited. Ròm’s success encouraged attention to a younger generation of Vietnamese directors willing to mix local street culture with globally legible genre and festival language. Its domestic theatrical performance also demonstrated audience interest in a film that remained visually and socially rough rather than smoothing itself into conventional commercial polish. Its protagonist survives by moving, and the film’s legacy is similarly restless.

Find This Film

Search “Ròm” with Trần Thanh Huy and 2019. Busan’s official archive and annual report provide the strongest award and jury provenance, while CGV’s release page confirms the later Vietnamese theatrical edition and runtime.