Three Seasons

Ho Chi Minh City carries four separate stories at once. A woman starts harvesting lotuses in the pond of a poet who has not shown himself to anyone for years because of leprosy. A cyclo driver falls in love with a prostitute and saves money so he can spend time with her. A boy selling trinkets on the street loses his case. And a retired American soldier comes looking for the daughter he left behind at the end of the war. Tony Bui was born in Vietnam and raised in America; this is his first feature. It is counted as the first American film shot entirely on location in Vietnam after the war. At Sundance in 1999 it took both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, the first film to win both. Harvey Keitel plays the American soldier. A hundred and five minutes, and its subject is not the war but the city left after it.