Future Cries Beneath Our Soil (Mùa cát vọng, 2018)

Five men, bound by years of shared history, gather in a doorless house at the former border between North and South Vietnam. They drink, smoke, play guitar, and sing songs of love and revolution. Within these rituals of companionship, their unresolved emotions are suspended in a landscape where time seems to stall. One of the most heavily bombarded regions of the Vietnam-American War, Tân Hiệp village remains shaped by memories of violence. Bomb fragments are embedded in the soil, unexploded ordnance is scattered across fields, and bodies are worn down by labour and memory. As some villagers scour the land for scrap metal, others endure aching limbs through liquor and stories of those lost. Even as an unforeseen event disrupts the fragile equilibrium among the five men, the village continues on, its scarred terrain bearing witness to a conflict that never fully receded.