The Roles and Representations of Women in Post-Doi Moi Vietnamese Cinema

Depictions of women have long been employed in various visual media as a form of synecdoche for social concerns, such as the nation. Filmmakers in Viet Nam have been using this kind of shorthand for decades, for example through the retelling of the legend of the Trung Sisters, or in the ubiquitous tourist image of a young woman wearing the traditional Vietnamese costume (áo dài). Viet Nam is an interesting case in that the Confucian kinship model, which foregrounds the values of filial piety and the importance of male children, would seem to suggest that women are not important. In this paper, I will use film examples from the late 1990s (the period immediately after doi moi, or economic renovation, was introduced) to illustrate how women came to represent Vietnamese resilience and tenacity in a time of rapid social and economic change.