ABSTRACT
Located in the midst of Saigon’s ritzy downtown is Diamond Plaza, which
houses a mall offering anything from Vietnamese kitsch to French designer
leather bags. This shopping complex is also where the hip urban crowd goes
for a movie night out – usually choosing between Hollywood blockbusters
and locally made Vietnamese films. In 2004, Nhung Co Gai Chan Dai (Long
Legged Girls) was screened to a sold-out audience at 40,000 dong a ticket.
At the equivalent of US$3.75, this is the price of a meal at a medium-scale
restaurant. Not only was the film’s box office success a sign of the growing disposable income of the Vietnamese middle class, it also highlighted the
extent of the public’s hunger for locally made films about the trials of daily
life rather than grand narratives about war and revolutionary valor.
