Fleuve Rouge, Song Hong

Viet Nam. The early hours in Hanoi of three young brothers newly arrived from their native village. Around the Long Bien Bridge, link between city and countryside, they cross the path of a young cop and a street vendor.

Intentions.

After years of war and isolation, Vietnam has adopted the market economy and is facing the same challenges as most «emerging countries» .
While growth has allowed the development of a middle class, it has also widened the gap between the richest and left behind.
At the same time, this openness has seriously undermined the traditional Vietnamese society based on family life and work in the fields.
A growing number of young Vietnamese leave their home villages for the myth of a better life in town.
Most of them live on painful and unprofitable jobs, such as cyclo drivers, shoe shiners, street vendors and musicians.
Meanwhile, the government instructed the police to "hunt" for street vendors and "clean" the streets of the capital of this too visible poverty.
Through this film, we want to show the difficulties these poor people have to face by making the parallel between the social problems caused by job insecurity and physical hazards that are mines and other unexploded objects, remnants of war.

Most of the action takes place on a small island in the Red River that marks the city limits. Indeed, Ha Noi means in Vietnamese "Inside the river".
This ambiguous place, neither town nor country, is where our main characters begin to understand the reality of their situation.They left their home for a city that does not want them.
It is this awareness which we consider important, this moment of hesitation.

Although inspired by actual events, this film is above all a fiction.
We focus on a particular situation, while using lots of details that we observed during several trips to Vietnam since 2002, when we worked on our first film "Goodbye Mr. Chu".