L. Ville

Di is a 12-year-old girl from the mist-shrouded mountains of northern Vietnam. She belongs to the Hmong, an ethnic minority in which girls get married at a very young age. This is often preceded by a controversial “bride-napping,” where the girl is abducted by her future husband on New Year’s Eve. Negotiations between the families follow. This also happened to Di’s sister and their mother, so it doesn’t seem strange that in preparation the women and girls discuss sex and married life without embarrassment. But Di also goes to school, where she learns very different values. And in her own way, even Di’s mother tries to warn her daughter about child marriage.

Phong grew up in a small town in the center of Vietnam - the youngest of six children. From the time she was young, Phong felt like she was a girl with a mismatched boy's body. Not until she moved to Hanoi to attend university at age 20 did Phong discover that she was not the only one in the world with this predicament. Her dream to 'find herself' by physically changing sex becomes a reality several years later. The movie follows Phong's struggle during these years, with excerpts from an intimate video journal, along with encounters with family, friends and doctors - all of whom must come to terms with Phong determination to become a "complete girl".

Documenting the transformation of Bưởi Road in Hanoi, from a labyrinth of houses and small businesses to a highway, with demolition crew destroying buildings - some still inhabited, gleaners looking for metal scraps to sell for a living, and people living on the edge of this crowded road finding a way to keep on living.

Thi and Trung live in the gorgeous, rice-terraced mountains of Vietnam’s far northwest. Like many young men in this region on the main heroin route from Laos to China, they’re addicts, and they have HIV. Thi wants to kick his habit. Trung just wants to die. “With or Without Me ” is an intimate, tragicomic portrayal of two guys strung out at the edge of the map of a country struggling with drug use, and of the wives, family, doctors and friends trying to pull them back from the brink.