The second film that profoundly shaped my engagement with Vietnamese cinema is Đặng Nhật Minh’s When the Tenth Month Comes (Bao giờ cho đến tháng Mười), a 1984 film that marked a shift in Vietnamese filmmaking during the post-war Đổi Mới reform period. Unlike earlier films that served as overt tools of political messaging, this film takes a subtler, more poetic approach, offering a meditative exploration of personal grief within the larger tapestry of national trauma.
In my thesis, I wrote:
“Vietnamese films started to focus on the deeper crevices of human suffering by centering narratives on the fate of individuals, moving away from the conflict rooted in triumph and victory to explore instead with the paradigms of loss, suffering and trauma… When the Tenth Month Comes offers one of the earliest individualised perspectives on the human suffering of the war.”
The plot follows Duyên, a young schoolteacher and widow in the final days of the war. She returns to her village, carrying the unbearable knowledge that her husband has died in combat, a truth she chooses to hide from her young son and elderly father-in-law. What follows is not a grand drama, but a quiet, internal journey through grief, duty, and the crushing silence of loss. Shot in dreamy black-and-white, the film unfolds like a lyrical poem, echoing traditional Vietnamese aesthetics of watercolour painting, Ca trù music, and folklore. The cinematography lingers on faces, misty landscapes, and intimate domestic scenes, making the emotional undercurrents of Duyên’s story all the more devastating.
When I first watched it, something strange happened, I didn’t connect with it. Not immediately. Unlike Little Girl of Hanoi, which emotionally wrecked me on first viewing, When the Tenth Month Comes felt distant. I was mesmerised by the visuals, the palette, the framing, the slow rhythms, but emotionally, I couldn’t quite reach Duyên. Her grief felt rooted in a cultural memory I hadn’t yet unlocked in myself.
That changed when I began learning more about the film’s restoration. Through my research I discovered the extraordinary efforts of Gerald Herman, a filmmaker and archivist who tracked down the film’s lost negative, navigated bureaucratic hurdles, and led the restoration with Đặng Nhật Minh himself. Hearing this story, the love, labour, and near loss of the film, made me realise how fragile cultural memory is. Films like this exist on the edge of oblivion, kept alive only through obsession and care.
Herman told me that when he finally got the reels out of Vietnam and into a Bangkok telecine lab, the condition of the film was so poor that it nearly couldn’t be saved. Mould, brittle splices, time had almost won. But they cleaned it, scanned it, colour-graded it, and restored it under Minh’s own supervision. When I watched the restored version again, knowing its journey, knowing Minh’s involvement, something unlocked in me. I was older. My perspective had shifted. The film now spoke to me in a way it hadn’t before.
That second viewing made me realise how our relationship with cinema , especially war cinema, evolves as we do. Duyên’s grief, once foreign to me, now felt familiar, like something inherited rather than remembered. It wasn’t just a story about war, it was about silence, about protecting others from pain, about the unbearable weight of duty. And maybe that’s why it took me time to feel it. Because films like When the Tenth Month Comes don’t shout. They whisper.