Vietnam 2021, 92 min, Vietnamese and Hmong, English subtitles
If not for the possibility that sometime soon, a man will kidnap her to marry her, one could easily mistake Di for a typical teenage girl. Constantly on her phone, the 12-year-old shows a budding interest in boys, fights with her mother over chores, and plays with her friends in the misty countryside. Except Di is one of the Hmong people, an insular, traditional community living in the mountains of North Vietnam, where the custom of kidnapping child brides is still observed. Di’s mother and sister have gone through it, but Di has absorbed different values and finds it hard to believe that her childhood is about to come to a sudden end. Director Diem Ha Le has followed Di through three tumultuous years of adolescence and captured her attempts to make sense of the divide between tradition and her dreams.
Previous Festivals: IDFA, Titanic Budapest International Film Festival
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