There are films that entertain, films that educate, and then there are films that shatter you. Little Girl of Hanoi is the latter. Directed by Hải Ninh and released in 1974, this haunting black-and-white drama follows a young girl, Ngọc Hà, wandering the war-torn streets of Hanoi in search of her father after the Christmas Bombings killed her mother and sister. It sounds simple, but the emotional weight it carries is anything but.
I first encountered Little Girl of Hanoi in 2019 while researching for my MA thesis at Birkbeck. It was one of three war films I watched that day at the Vietnamese Film Institute, but this one clung to me. I watched it in a darkened room, staff murmuring in the background, but the world outside fell away. It didn’t feel like watching fiction. It felt like witnessing something deeply personal, something painfully close to the neighbourhoods my family once called home.
Hai Ninh shot this film during and directly after the B-52 bombings of Kham Thiên Street and Bạch Mai Hospital. The rubble is real. The faces of survivors are real. The pain is real. And through Hà’s tear-streaked face, often framed in close-ups reminiscent of The Passion of Joan of Arc or Ivan’s Childhood, we are made to carry that grief with her. The cinematography, spare, stark, beautiful, doesn’t allow emotional distance. It binds us to her.
In my thesis, I wrote about how Vietnamese cinema, born in the shadow of revolution and reconstruction, often functioned as state-sanctioned storytelling. Controlled, curated, politicised. And Little Girl of Hanoi is undoubtedly a product of that system, its narrative structured to reaffirm the heroism of the North and the cruelty of war. But that doesn’t make its power any less. Propaganda or not, it is also poetry. The film pulses with something raw and unresolved: the trauma of civilians, the innocence of children caught in firestorms, and a city struggling to hold itself together.
Watching it cracked something open in me. I began questioning why these films, so rich in emotion, beauty, and history, were mostly locked away in archives or uploaded in pixelated fragments online. Why hadn’t I, or anyone I knew, grown up with them? Why did I need to piece together my Vietnamese identity not through stories passed down by my family, but through grainy footage and subtitles?
Little Girl of Hanoi became the catalyst. A film that blurred the lines between cinematic storytelling and documentary realism. When I asked my mother if she had seen it, she paused, then quietly told me she had, in a packed Hanoi cinema where everyone was crying. For her, it was a documentary. For me, it was the first time she’d ever shared a memory of Vietnam so vividly. That exchange, brief but monumental, stayed with me. It made me wonder: could this film do the same for others? Could it be shown again, on UK screens, and invite shared reflection across generations?
Final verdict? Little Girl of Hanoi is not just a film, it’s a reckoning. With history, with memory, with grief. It’s a cornerstone of Vietnamese cinema and a reminder of why these stories matter, because they’re not just stories. They’re legacies.