When the Tenth Month Comes

Dang Nhat Minh's 1984 Vietnamese film follows Duyen, who learns that her husband has been killed at the front. She hides the news from her ailing father-in-law and her young son, inventing letters from her husband and continuing to read them aloud. The subject is grief postponed. To protect everyone Duyen never experiences her own pain, and the postponement stretches over years; the narrative does not exalt this as sacrifice but shows it as an unbearable weight. The film does not turn the war into propaganda; there are no scenes of heroism and the front is never seen. Local beliefs and encounters with the dead sit inside the narrative. It became the first Vietnamese film screened in America after the war. Who it's for: those who like Southeast Asian cinema and postwar drama. Who it's not for: viewers expecting narrative movement; the film consists almost entirely of waiting and silence.