The Guava Season

The Guava House (original title Mùa oi) is a 2000 Vietnamese Film written and directed by Đặng Nhật Minh. The film is based on a short story written my Minh called “Ngôi nhà xưa” (The Old House) published 1993 in the magazine a Van Nghe Weekly. The film follows the former and current residents of a house surrendered to the Vietnamese Government during the Land reform in North Vietnam|1950s Land reform of in Northern Vietnam.
== Plot ==
At the age of thirteen, Hoa falls from a guava tree and suffers a traumatic brain injury. After being hospitalized and treated he regains consciousness but seizes to develop mentally, remaining mentally a child for the rest of his life. Hoa works as a model for an art school and lives with his sister, who is also his caretaker. He is arrested sneaking into his old family home, but eventually befriends the new homeowner’s daughter, Loan. She temporarily lives alone with her housekeeper as her father is away working in another city. Hoa returns frequently to the house, eventually moving back in. Whilst there, he receives vivid flashbacks of his childhood: the death of his mother, playing with his siblings, his father working endlessly on a manuscript and more. When Loan’s father returns, he is deeply upset that his daughter has let a mentally ill stranger stay in the house and calls for Hoa to be institutionalized. Once his sister and Loan return him from the mental hospital, he no longer remembers anything about his childhood or the old house.
== Reception ==
In early April, Đặng Nhật Minh received news that the film would premiere in Paris starting April 17 2002 and will last for 2 months across France. In the first 10 days of screening in Paris, 17,000 people watched Guava season. Whilst the director was happy to be given the chance to screen hims film internationally.
The film did disproportionately poorly in Vietnam, something the director attributes to cinema's in the country receiving more revenue per ticket when screening Korean or United States|American films. Because of this the cinema's barely advertised the film so that they could stop screening it after just a few days, citing low interest as the reason. One Vietnamese woman who wanted to see the film had to rent an entire movie theater just to watch the film, since the cinema screening it claimed she would have been the only viewer.
== Themes ==
The perspective on betrayal in the film is expressed by Director Đặng Nhật Minh through his questioning of the relationship between individual memory and the so-called national history and the transmission of collective memory. When Mr. Hoa's brother told Loan a story about the history of the house, Loan was surprised and did not understand because "the stories she told sounded so strange!". This represents a class of young people not knowing a hidden part of history.
And the detail that Mr. Hoa was forced to inject sedatives by Loan's father, made the cover-up of history pushed up: first, confiscated the property of the person who had voluntarily contributed to the revolution; now, "seize" the personal memories of their children and grandchildren. The brainwashing of Mr. Hoa, a historical witness, means killing history. The sound of sawing guava trees resounded in the ears of Mr. Hoa's sister when the house was now in the hands of a foreign private company and the image of a long train on Long Bien Bridge summed up the pain of a successful family. the tragedy of the country; and the rejection of a family turns into trans-generational betrayal.
== Cast ==
* Bài Bình Bùi, Lan Huong Nguyen
* Thu Thuy Pham
* Thi Huong Thao Le
* Thao Huong
* Do Hua
* Khac Lam Pham,
== Awards ==
* Golden Lotus award at the Vietnam Film Festival in 2001
* The prize of the Vietnam Cinema Association in 2000
* Young Jury Prize and World Association of Cinema Clubs Donkihote Prize at the Swiss Locarno Film Festival in 2000.