Der Garten des Herrn Vong

Bückeburg: a garden complete with a small shed and flowerbeds. Mr Vong only grows Chinese vegetables. As a child he helped his parents in the tobacco fields. Life after the war was tough, he speaks of his escape; a calm, introverted man, only the gentle kneading motion of his hands betrays the fact that his thoughts and heart are preoccupied with the past. Personally born in Vietnam, his ancestors fled during the Sino-Japanese War from southern China to Vietnam, where they subsequently had a hard time at the hands of the new regime. Gardening would appear to be a last means for him to draw closer to a homeland now lost.

This slow-paced observation of the protagonist working away in his garden puts the viewer in an almost meditative state, as director Dieu Hao Do offers a profound portrait of a contemporary witness to the unrest, the effects of which were felt by large parts of the Vietnamese population in the period after 1975. DD