KY NAM INN (QUÁN KỲ NAM)
DIRECTOR: leon le
140 MINS, vietnam, 2025, SUBTITLED
Winner: Kau Ka Hōkū (Shooting Star) Grand Jury Award, Hawaiʻi International Film Festival 2025
The screening will be introduced by Trà My Nguyễn Hoàng.
Khang (Liên Bỉnh Phát) is on his way to success. Due to his family connection, he is assigned the much-coveted job of working on a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Moving to an apartment in Saigon to start his new job, Khang finds himself emotionally entwined with his neighbour Kỳ Nam (Đỗ Thị Bảo Yến), a reserved widow of a Southern Vietnamese officer, who now makes her living by cooking. As Khang searched for the right word for his manuscript, he also found himself in conflict with the prejudices typical of the post-war era. Beautifully captured on 35mm film, Ky Nam Inn is not only a slow and lyrical tale of conflicting desires and unexpected connections, but also a love letter to the tumultuous years of post-war Saigon, its vibrancy and eccentricities tenderly rendered and contained within the apartment building.
(Notes by Trà My Nguyễn Hoàng)
