Vietnam Has the World's Best Untold Stories

By Eric T. Pham

My mother was processing evacuation lists in the last days of April 1975.

Not metaphorically. Literally: she was a secretary to U.S. officials, and part of what that meant in those final days was sitting at a desk deciding, in real time, whose name went on the list and whose didn't. Who would get out. Who would stay behind. Administrative work that was also, in those specific weeks, a question of survival.

She was doing this while holding an infant.

That infant was me.

I didn't fully understand this story until I was an adult. I knew we had left. I knew the circumstances were urgent. But the image of my mother — making decisions about who escapes history while being inside it, with a child in her arms — didn't arrive in its full weight until I was old enough to understand what it cost her to be that calm. What it required of her to keep working while the city she had built her life in was ending outside the window.

That image is a Vietnamese story. Specific, irreplaceable, the kind that doesn't have a Western equivalent because the experience it describes doesn't have one. It's not a war story, exactly. It's not an escape story, exactly. It's a story about a woman at a desk doing her job with precision and dignity at the precise moment when everything around her was coming apart.

I've spent fifty years figuring out how to tell it correctly.

And I am far from alone. Vietnam is a country of a hundred million people whose modern history is among the most dramatically dense of any nation on earth — and whose cinema has barely begun to carry that history to the world.

That is the opportunity I want to talk about. And why the window to do it right is narrower than it appears.

In the late 1980s, the South Korean government made a decision that most people outside South Korea didn't notice at the time.

They sent their best and most promising filmmakers — two thousand of them, over time — to learn world-class production craft. Hollywood structure. European art cinema rigor. The full range of what cinema could do technically and narratively when developed to its highest level. Then they invested in building the infrastructure to tell Korean stories for global audiences with that level of craft.

The results took decades to materialize and are now impossible to ignore — including, I'll admit, for those of us who have sat through enough K-dramas to recognize the exact episode where the cold male lead finally breaks down in the rain while the female protagonist stands at a window not knowing he's outside. The answer, if you're wondering, is usually episode fourteen. Of sixteen.

I say this with genuine affection and only mild exasperation. Korean dramas have a set of narrative conventions so codified they function almost as a contract between the show and its audience: the misunderstanding that could be resolved with one honest conversation but won't be for eleven episodes, the hospital bed vigil, the moment someone drops their umbrella and stares at something meaningful in the middle distance. Fans around the world know these conventions by heart and return to them voluntarily. There is something almost envious about that — the depth of loyalty a formula can generate when it's built on genuine emotional truth underneath the scaffolding. Korean content has earned its audience not in spite of its patterns but partly because of them. The patterns are the promise. And Korea has kept it, consistently, at scale.

Parasite won Best Picture. Not Best Foreign Language Film — Best Picture, full stop, the first non-English film in the Academy's history. Squid Game became the most-watched series Netflix has ever produced. K-pop fills stadiums on every continent. Korean cinema is now a brand that precedes individual films — a viewer in São Paulo or Stockholm or Lagos will give a Korean film a chance on national origin alone, because national origin has become a reliable signal of a certain quality of craft and a certain depth of cultural specificity.

What Korea built is genuinely extraordinary. It is also worth examining clearly, because the full picture is more complicated than the headlines.

The tropes are a compression technology — they make Korean content globally legible, which is exactly what they're designed to do, at the cost of some of the specific roughness that made Parasite and Burning and Poetry feel like they could only have come from exactly where they came from. More quietly, Korea also exports something its fans absorb without quite realizing they're absorbing it: a standard of appearance, amplified through the flawless faces of idols and leads, that has created a global market for procedures their admirers would not have considered before they found the content. Korean beauty standards have traveled alongside Korean stories. Fans around the world — in Vietnam, in Brazil, in Thailand — are, without fully noticing it, receiving an implicit argument that a specific, surgically refined version of appearance is the destination. The physical-world version of what AI is doing digitally. Both offer a perfected simulacrum in place of the specific, imperfect, irreplaceable original. Both create markets for the synthetic that gradually erode the cultural value of the authentic.

This is not a reason to dismiss what Korea built. It's a reason to understand it fully before deciding what to emulate and what to leave behind.

What Korea had was not superior stories. Every culture has stories of equivalent depth and dramatic richness. What Korea had was a deliberate, generational investment in the craft to make those stories legible to strangers — to make the specific emotional texture of Korean family dynamics, Korean class conflict, Korean shame and sacrifice and dark humor land in the chest of someone who had never been to Korea and had no cultural context for any of it.

That is a craft problem with a craft solution. It took Korea approximately thirty years from the decision to the global dominance.

Vietnam is at the beginning of that decision point now. The question is what it decides to export alongside the stories.

The market data is already moving in ways the industry hasn't fully registered.

Vietnamese cinema hit a record $175.9 million at the box office in 2024. Vietnamese films captured more than 40 percent of their own domestic market — which, for context, is a figure most Western cinema industries would envy on their home turf. Mai, a family drama made for $2 million, generated $21.67 million at the Vietnamese box office — a return that surpasses the typical Hollywood ROI benchmark by a significant margin. The industry has expanded from 90 screens in 2010 to more than 1,100 screens today, with 54 million admissions in 2024. Eighty percent of Vietnam's cinema audience is under 29 — which means they grew up watching Korean dramas on phones their parents didn't know they had, and they know exactly what they want more of.

This is not a mature market in gradual decline. It's a market in formation, with demographics that any distribution executive would describe as ideal and growth trajectories that are still accelerating.

What's particularly significant is what's performing. Vietnamese folklore horror — stories rooted in specific spiritual traditions, in the animist landscape of Vietnamese belief, in the particular relationship between the living and the dead that runs underneath Vietnamese daily life — is outperforming imported Hollywood horror at the local box office. Audiences are not choosing Vietnamese stories because they're settling for local content while waiting for the American import. They're choosing Vietnamese stories because those stories carry something the American import cannot carry: the specific texture of their own world made visible on screen.

That preference is commercially expressed and culturally significant. The demand is real, and the demand is specifically for authenticity — not Vietnamese aesthetics applied to Western narrative structures, but Vietnamese stories told from the inside.

Others are beginning to recognize this. Korean production companies, international streaming platforms, and Vietnamese studios themselves are all moving toward the infrastructure gap the market has revealed. What none of them can replicate is the person who grew up inside both worlds — who doesn't translate between them because they were never separate languages to begin with.

The gap is not in the audience. The gap is in the craft infrastructure that would allow Vietnamese filmmakers to take those stories global with the same force that Korean cinema achieved. And that gap is the most solvable problem I know of.

Here is what I want to say plainly, because the optimistic market framing can obscure it.

Some of the most important Vietnamese stories are not waiting indefinitely. They have a biological deadline.

The generation that experienced the formative decades of modern Vietnam from the inside — that lived through war, reconstruction, the specific daily texture of what it meant to survive the end of one world and build another — is in their sixties, seventies, eighties. The firsthand knowledge they carry is not in archives. It's not fully in books. It lives in people, in the specific way memory is embodied: in what a person notices, what they can't stop noticing, the details they return to involuntarily because those details are where the truth of the experience actually lives.

When the people who carry that specific embodied knowledge are gone, what remains is secondhand. Researched. Carefully assembled from accounts. Potentially excellent — history produces excellent secondhand accounts — but categorically different from the cinema that can only be made by people who grew up inside the experience or were raised by people who did.

That window is not closed. But it is not permanent.

I think about this the way Vân-Ánh Võ thinks about the masters of Vietnamese classical music — the musicians whose specific understanding of how the đàn bầu breathes in a particular regional style lives in their hands and their ears and nowhere else on earth. You can document what they know while they're here. Or you can wait until it's reconstruction.

The same choice exists for Vietnamese cinema. You can make these films now, while the firsthand world is still accessible. Or you can make them later from the outside looking in.

The bridge between Vietnamese stories and global audiences is not a financial problem or a marketing problem.

It's a craft problem. Specifically: the gap between cultural authenticity and narrative legibility. A story can be completely, specifically, irreducibly Vietnamese and still not reach an audience in São Paulo or Seoul or Stockholm — not because the audience wouldn't respond to it, but because the filmmaker hasn't yet learned how to make its particular emotional logic accessible to someone who carries none of the same cultural context.

This is precisely what Korea solved. Not by making Korean stories less Korean. By developing filmmakers who understood both the specific cultural material they were working with and the narrative architecture that allows that material to travel. Specificity and legibility working together rather than in tension.

I was trained in Hollywood by people who understood commercial narrative architecture at its highest level. I carry Vietnamese cultural fluency that isn't learnable in a classroom — it's experiential, rooted in the specific texture of that history and that displacement and those fifty years of carrying both worlds simultaneously. A Hollywood filmmaker can hire a Vietnamese cultural consultant. A Vietnamese filmmaker can study Hollywood structure. Neither of them is the same as a person who grew up inside both, who doesn't translate between them because they're not separate languages — they're both native.

That's what Phame Factory and Bridge Builder Entertainment are built to do. Not just my films — though my films are the proof of concept — but the infrastructure for a generation of Vietnamese filmmakers who understand what it means to carry a specific cultural world and the craft to make it land universally.

I want to be direct about something, because Vietnamese institutions deserve directness more than they deserve diplomacy.

The filmmakers I have encountered in Vietnam are not waiting to be discovered. They are not raw material for a Western producer's vision of what their country should look like on screen. They carry specific, developed instincts about their own world — instincts I cannot replicate, instincts that took their entire lives to build. What many of them don't yet have is the structural knowledge that makes those instincts travel. The narrative architecture. The pacing decisions. The twenty small choices in a script that determine whether a story landing completely in Ho Chi Minh City also lands in São Paulo.

That knowledge is transferable. It took me thirty years to accumulate and I have no interest in keeping it.

The infrastructure we are building — the partnerships, the Film Institute, the production frameworks — is designed to be inhabited by Vietnamese filmmakers, not managed by outsiders on their behalf. The goal is not Vietnamese cinema with American supervision. The goal is Vietnamese filmmakers with the full toolkit.

What they do with it is theirs.

There is a different kind of story I want to tell you about, because it connects everything above to something more immediate and more personal.

Willow's Journey is a family film — a story about an eleven-year-old girl named Willow who loses her mother and discovers an enchanted grove where the seven stages of grief manifest as living, breathing magic. Earth and water and wind. A talking dog who is wiser than she appears. A Heart Seed that can only bloom when tended by someone ready to heal. The kind of story that works for children because it doesn't lie to them about what loss actually feels like, and works for adults because it doesn't either.

In recent years I've lost people close to me. Not one loss but several, arriving the way losses sometimes do — in waves, before you've finished processing the previous one. Each time, I found myself inside the same question Willow faces in the grove: how do you carry grief and love simultaneously? How do you let someone be gone without letting them disappear? How do you move forward without it meaning you've moved on?

These are not Vietnamese questions. They're not American questions. They belong to anyone who has ever loved someone and had to learn to live without them.

What I discovered writing Willow — and what I believe is the most commercially underserved opportunity in family film right now — is that children are not protected from grief by keeping stories simple. They're protected by stories that take their experience seriously. That show the non-linear mess of it. That say: the Heart Seed won't bloom just because you want it to. Healing can't be rushed. The grove knows before you do whether you're ready.

The script's emotional core — that love and loss coexist rather than resolve — came from sitting inside my own grief and refusing to reach for easy comfort. Willow's tears in Filip's cave, when the Heart Seed withers despite everything she's tried, is the scene I'm most committed to protecting in every draft. Because that moment of failure — the realization that you cannot grieve your way through grief by force of will — is the truest thing in the film. It's the thing I needed to understand and didn't for longer than I'd like to admit.

A studio executive suggested the film should be fully hand-animated — Miyazaki, he said, which is the highest compliment anyone can pay a family film and I received it as such. The filmmaker in me took a moment longer. My producer instinct then translated the rest: sixty million dollars minimum, three to five years, and a production infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. What I decided instead was a hybrid approach — real actors in a practical world, CGI creatures built to carry genuine emotional weight, and AI tools integrated into the workflow in ways that accelerate without replacing. Sadie will be rendered. Willow will be a person. The grove will be built and photographed and lit. The Heart Seed will bloom in a room where a child actor was actually crying — not because an algorithm generated the most statistically effective version of that moment, but because we earned it.

That distinction is the whole argument.

This is what I mean when I say the most universal stories emerge from the most specific personal truth. Willow's Journey is not a Vietnamese story. But it was written by a Vietnamese-American filmmaker who has lost people and needed to find a form for what that felt like — and who has enough craft, after thirty years, to build a world around that feeling that a child in any language can enter and not feel alone.

Grief doesn't need translation. It's already universal.

What I'm building — through the films, through Bridge Builder, through the Film Institute — is an answer to a question that took me fifty years to fully understand how to ask.

Not: how do I make Vietnamese stories acceptable to global audiences? That's the wrong question. It produces the wrong cinema — content that flattens the specific in the hope of reaching the universal, and loses both.

The right question is: how do I develop filmmakers who understand that the specific is the universal? That a woman at a desk in Saigon making decisions with an infant in her arms is not a local story. That a girl in an enchanted grove who can't make a seed bloom because her heart isn't ready yet is not a children's story. That these are human stories — wearing specific clothes, speaking specific languages, carrying specific histories — and that the specificity is what makes them land.

Vietnam has a hundred million people and stories enough to fill a century of cinema. The filmmakers who can tell those stories with the craft to make them travel are rare, are findable, and are waiting for the infrastructure that makes it possible.

That infrastructure is what we're here to build.

The audience is everywhere. The stories are already there.

It's just time to tell them correctly.

Eric T. Pham is the founder of Phame Factory Productions and Bridge Builder Entertainment. He has 27 Hollywood credits including Sin City, Mission: Impossible II, and 007: The World Is Not Enough. The Between Worlds series explores craft, technology, and the specific opportunity of Vietnamese cinema at this moment in its history.

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