VIETNAM - A CRY FROM WITHIN
a film by André Menras
Shot in a clandestine and improvised manner, this film gives voice to several dozen famous or anonymous Vietnamese who asked to express their sadness, their revolt, their dismay, facing a one-party regime under strong Chinese influence.
All of them denounce the leaders who do not tolerate any protest and trample on the very values that brought them to power.
Police violence, corruption, intimidation and fear affect all social layers and seem to mark the limits of this regime from another age.
The highest international bodies of big business praise Vietnam's impressive economic development. This film, penetrating into the heart of Vietnamese society seeks to bring into the light the brutal and painful contrast between these external signs of economic progress and the state of human and citizen rights in the country.
He gives voice to dozens of famous or anonymous characters who ask to speak of their suffering, their bitterness and their dismay faced with a dictatorial regime that tramples on values and many of those who brought him to power ...
Over the course of the meetings, the film reveals how the police network of society set up during the resistance to French colonization and then to American occupation was maintained and monopolized by the Communist Party to dominate and control all social strata.
How the revolution "turned" against the people, in the words of a writer who expresses himself in the film.
How the independence of the country which cost 3 million Vietnamese dead is currently under attack at sea and on land by Beijing's expansionism.
Violence of censorship, prohibition of movement and assembly, assaults in the street by thugs hired the police; violence of arrest or kidnapping, confiscation of land for speculative purposes by corrupt executives hooked up with crooked businessmen; violence of incarceration in a network of penitentiary centers whose conditions of detention have nothing to envy to those in the camps of the old regime; threats to families, daily harassment of relatives, by phone calls, by ostensible shadowing...
Veterans of the Vietcong maquis or the Northern Army who speak out against corruption and the Chinese stranglehold on their country talk about the tearing of their confiscated dreams.
Intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, poets and writers, including farmers, fishermen and veterans of the old regime, abandoned or despoiled, all of them speak with dignity and force their nightmare, their aspirations for a peaceful, stable, hardworking and dignified life, their demand for a "civilized" civil society.
The author and director, native French and first foreigner to have received Vietnamese nationality for his past contribution to the struggle for independence, is honored to serve today as a megaphone for all these exceptional people, for their courage and for their love for their country.
André Menras - Hồ Cương Quyết