The Little Girl of Hanoi Offers Rare Cinematic View of Vietnam War
The Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art will offer a film screening of Hai Ninh’s The Little Girl of Hanoi, Saturday, Oct. 2, at 2 p.m., which offers a rare view of Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Filmed amid the rubble of a recently bombed Hanoi, this harrowing tale of a girl searching for her soldier father after losing the rest of her family during a bombardment is a powerful drama and a very rare look at life in the city during the Vietnam War. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum said, “the film is remarkable not only for its sincerity and emotional directness but for its accomplished visual style.”
The film won the Golden Lotus honor for best feature film at the Vietnam Film Festival in 1975.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with panelists Bill Marmon, Time magazine correspondent in Saigon 1968-71 and former vice president of the US-ASEAN Business Council; Frederick Z. Brown Southeast Asia scholar at Johns Hopkins University and former State Department country director for Vietnam; Ron Nessen, White House Press Secretary under Gerald Ford and former Saigon NBC News correspondent; William Belding, professor at American University’s School of International Service and former president and CEO of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation; and Rosenbaum, film critic and authority on world cinema.
The film is part of “Hanoi on Film: Then and Now,” a series honoring the millennium anniversary of the founding of Hanoi. The series, which screens Oct. 1-3 in the Freer’s Meyer Auditorium, is co-sponsored by the Embassy of Vietnam in Washington, D.C., and is presented in association with the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
To learn more about “Hanoi on Film” and other films at the Freer, the public may visit www.asia.si.edu/events/films.asp. For more information about Freer and Sackler exhibitions, programs and events, the public may visit www.asia.si.edu.
The Freer Gallery of Art, located at 12th Street and Independence Avenue S.W., and the adjacent Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, located at 1050 Independence Avenue S.W., are on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every day, except Dec. 25, and admission is free. The galleries are located near the Smithsonian Metrorail station on the Blue and Orange lines.
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