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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Karina Zimmerman
REMIS, LLC
888-802-1214
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www.customflix.com/Store/ShowEStore.jsp?id=225161
Long-Lost Vintage 1970s Film Starring Trinh Cong Son Released on DVD.
REMIS, LLC,thanks to George Washinis LLC, is pleased to announce that the newly released vintage "Dat Kho - Land of Sorrows" DVD is now available to the public at CustomFlix.com. www.customflix.com/Store/ShowEStore.jsp?id=225161
"Dat Kho" Land of Sorrows
Starring: Trinh Cong Son, Bich Hop, Yuan Ha, Van Quynh, Luu Nguyen Dot
Directed By: Ha Thuc Can
Dat Kho - The Film
This 1970s foreign, English-subtitled film, starring the beloved Vietnamese iconic songwriter/poet/painter Trinh Cong Son (1939-2001) in what may be his only starring movie role, dramatizes the effect of the Vietnam War on a single South Vietnamese family, the inner conflict of decisions by each member of the family whether to remain in vietnam or leave with the imminent advance and fall of Hue and eventual fall of Vietnam. Dat Kho is a story of the love of family, love of homeland, love of the culture and language of Vietnam and the ethereal love of the ingenue daughter for her fiance, foiled by the antagonistic forces of the ever-present war. It is thought-provoking, and at the same time it directly relates to present day conflicts such as the Gulf War and Iraq in challenging the reasons for foreign involvement in essentially a civil war and addressing the lessons learned or that should have been learned.
Film Review
Steven Hunter, Washington Post. "A real rarity -- I've seen this one, but almost no one else has -- is "Dat-Kho," translated from the Vietnamese as "Land of sorrows." And boy, is it ever. It's a fictional family molodrama actually filmed in the mid-'70s, during the fall; it follows the course of the war as it implodes the life of five members of a family in Hue, including a draft dodger and a ranger captain. Those explosions in the background? Well, let's put it this way -- special effects courtesy of the North Vietnamese regular army. The film, which was literally locked in a trunk for 25 years and has emerged only recently (this is its first commercial showing in 25 years, possibly ever), was directed by Ha Thuc Can. Washington's large Vietnamese population and its community of retired old salts with shrapnel still in their flesh should come out in droves for it."
From VietnamLit.org:
In 1973, he starred in a film, Dat Kho[Land of Sorrows], which compressed three seminal events of the Vietnam War: (1) the Buddhist uprising in Hue during 1965; (2) the Tet Offensive in 1968; and (3) the 1972 "Summer of Fire" (mùa hè ðỏ lửa). It includes real footage of refugees fleeing the North Vietnamese' Easter Offensive of 1972. Steven Hunter of the Washington Post comments:
"A fictional family melodrama [...] it follows the course of the war as it implodes the life of five members of a family in Hue, including a draft dodger and a ranger captain. Those explosions in the background? Well, let's put it this way -- special effects courtesy of the North Vietnamese regular army."
This film--the only one ever directed by Hà Thúc Cần, a cameraman previously with CBS, now an art dealer with a gallery in Singapore--had its first commercial showing at Paris' Orient Theater in 1980 and its first US showing in the Fall of 1996 at the American Film Institute's Kennedy Center location in Washington D.C.; then at The University of Maryland and George Mason University as part of the Asian American International Film Festival that Ðinh Từ Bích Thúy coordinated for the Greater Washington D.C. area. Ðất Khổ was banned in South Vietnam before 1975 and in all of Vietnam since.
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