Nguyễn Hữu Tuấn

In early 1950s Vietnam, a young American becomes entangled in a dangerous love triangle when he falls for the beautiful mistress of a British journalist. As war is waged around them, the trio sinks deeper into a world of drugs, passion, and betrayal where nothing is as it seems.

Based on a well-known novel of the same title by author Duong Huong, “Wharf of Widows” reflects stories in the context of a rural Village called Dong – a typical North Vietnamese village with bamboo ramparts, communal house roofs, banyan trees and wharves. It was a time when the north hurried to build up the countryside and support the southern battlefield. The movie takes us back to the olden days of peaceful northern villages and women waiting for their men to return from the battlefield. The war robbed the village of healthy strong men leaving behind the women who waited at the water’s edge.

Set in a small village in North Vietnam, a tale of awakening which traces a growing love triangle between Nham, an earnest and responsible 17-year-old country boy; the charming Ngu, his lonely and naive sister-in-law with whom he works closely in the fields; and Quyen, a stylishly vivacious expatriate who has just returned from the city, curious about life in the village where she spent her childhood. While all three characters are too reticent to unleash their feelings, the romance turns on the realization that this web of emotions is largely symbolic. Nham represents for Quyen an innocence and a past that she can’t recapture, just as she represents for Nham an urbanity and future prospects that he may never attain; and caught between the two is the delicate Ngu, left in the most desolate postion of positions.

In the years following the American war a young woman from Hanoi teaches in a rural school in the south. There she meets a troubled young man, and they have a brief romance that she recalls wistfully years later in her unhappy marriage.

Returning to Vietnam after many years of studying abroad, a doctorate in atomic force Thai Duong entered an unimaginable reality. Many funny situations took place in his family when he was pondering over choosing a job in a new environment. Thai Duong was tricked into losing money, and his father and brother Loc Ton performed a risky mission to earn money: buying liquidated bombs.

A soldier (Hien) survives the war and comes back to live with his brother's family (Tien). He can't seem to adjust to civilian life after the war and feels increasingly alienated from other people, whom he finds calculating, selfish and materialistic.

At the close of the Sino-Vietnamese border war, a journalist travels to Lạng Sơn in northern Vietnam—the hometown of his former girlfriend—to report on the situation there.