Review: From Czechia, 'Trường Hè, 2001' Bridges Family Divides, Both Onscreen and in Real Life

Summer School, 2001, directed by Czech-Vietnamese writer and director Dužan Duong, was first released last year and has received critical acclaim within the Czech Republic and Europe. Now, the film has come to Vietnam, where it is available in Galaxy, Cinestar, and Beta theaters across Saigon, Hanoi and Đà Nẵng. The film takes place in Cheb, a small town in the Czech Republic near the German border, where a family of Vietnamese immigrants sell cheap counterfeit goods at a local marketplace. It is the summer of 2001. After having spent the past ten years in Vietnam living with his grandparents, 17-year-old Kiên finally returns to unite with his family. He is no longer the child that his parents last saw, but now a grown young man with pierced ears and flashy red-dyed hair. That summer, Kiên and his ten-year-old younger brother Tài attend a local summer school to improve their Czech.

What unfolds in the course of the film is a family drama, shaped by tensions and antagonisms between the male family members. Kiên despises his father for having sent him away to Vietnam alone, while his father feels increasingly self-conscious and ostracized within the Vietnamese community, not only due to rumors of his involvement in plans to demolish the marketplace, but also for his older son’s unapologetic and eccentric style and appearance — about whom he overhears friends making homophobic comments. The tensions between Kiên and his father also spill over to Kiên’s relationship with his brother, whose need for a hearing aid and its financial costs Kiên seems to blame for why he was sent to Vietnam.

The film is structured in three sequences, each told from the perspective of one of the main characters: Kiên’s father Dũng, Kiên’s brother Tài, and Kiên. The film’s structure is no doubt key to its capacity to startle and stagger readers, the ways in which it continuously builds and breaks tension. Each perspective builds upon the others, bringing to light what had previously been unseen, unsaid, unfelt. Indeed, much of the family’s conflicts are fueled by miscommunication, or rather, their aversion to communication. Yet at the same time, one wonders how that could at all have been avoided following a decade of separation.

Saigoneer had the opportunity to speak with Bùi Thế Dương, the actor who plays Kiên, who recounted some fascinating aspects of the coming-to-be of the film. Funnily enough, when he was cast for the role of Kiên, the director had no idea that Dương’s own story had a lot in common with Kiên’s. “I was born in Vietnam, and I lived with my parents until I was around four years old. Then they moved to the Czech Republic to work. In my real-life story, they tried to bring me there when I was five or six, but they couldn’t because it was around 2008, and there was the financial crisis and everything, so I wasn’t able to go. Then, when I was 12, they finally brought me there,” he explained. “In that way, my story is kind of similar to the main character in the movie. Of course, it’s not exactly the same as what happens in the film, especially because I arrived later, around 2015, but summer school still exists in many forms. It’s not always literally a school. It can also be a group for people who want to learn Czech. I think my life story isn’t as dramatic as the main character’s, but it’s very similar.”

Dương was first cast for a teaser film meant to raise funds for the actual movie, the production of which was not guaranteed at that point. Surprisingly, before Summer School 2001, he had no acting experience, nor did he think he would pursue a career in one. Indeed, he somewhat randomly signed up for auditions after stumbling upon a Facebook post advertising auditions. Viewers may be surprised to learn that Dương is not the only one who is new to acting in the film. With the exception of two characters — the father and his boss — all of the characters are played by individuals with no prior acting experience; according to Dương, Dužan prefers to call them “naturals” as opposed to “non-professional actors.” This is remarkable, not least of all for the fact that, speaking for myself here, at no point in the film did I ever doubt the actors’ credentials nor feel the acting to be amateurish. This is perhaps most impressive in the performance of child actor Tô Tiến Tài as Kiên’s younger brother Tài, who undertook the seemingly oxymoronic task of performing innocence — and its capacity for both anguish and jubilation.