ABSTRACT
This chapter upends global media's archive of Vietnamese refugees, one that has captured images of refugees fleeing in fear and cowering en masse. I look to a different archive altogether—Vietnamese fictional films that narrate the refugee movement within a highly melodramatic register. Life of a Flower (1953) and Song Lang (2018) offer a baroque window onto which the landscape of migration is studded with deeply felt sentiments of exile and loss. Both films reverberate with refugee affect, born of a historically situated sense of displacement and grounded in one of the most popular theatrical genres in Việt Nam–the cải lương opera.
