Ngọc Đặng

In 1955 Tay Ninh, the National United Front is established and gives Ngo Dinh Diem's government an ultimatum: reform or attack. Luan continues to handle his new rise of popularity within sociopolitical circles in South Vietnam. He goes to Da Lat for a vacation, where a meeting between him and a young woman has been arranged.

In 1981, six years after the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, Tan, a young former Vietcong officer, goes to take the ashes of his dead comrade, Thai, to his family in a remote area. On the overcrowded train out of Ho Chi Min City, he meets Mien, a former soldier and witness to Thai's death.

A family living in poverty faces financial difficulties while striving to educate their daughters. The mother resorts to extraordinary measures to procure the traditional silk dresses needed for her kids to attend school.

The year is 1950 and an English couple, Louise and Michael, have arrived in French-occupied Indochina to cover a story on a French-owned rubber plantation. They are to be the guests of the enigmatic plantation overseer, Daniel, and his beautiful yet difficult daughter Viola, at their elegant, decaying villa amid a tropical jungle. Michael and Louise hope that some time spent working in an exotic location will help reignite the passion in their floundering marriage. Instead they become unwittingly involved in the personal, sexual and political tensions of their hosts. Daniel is desperate to hold onto a way of life no longer possible in a country struggling for independence, bringing him into conflict with not only his daughter but also with his adopted country.