Farewell, Berlin Wall

A romantic drama that sketches the life of Quyen, a Vietnamese woman who attempts to illegally enter Germany in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall collapses. Quyen has only been married for two months when she crosses over a snow-laden mountain into Germany and is accidentally separated from her husband. She is kidnapped, raped, and has a child by Hung, a refugee smuggling broker. These are but two of the men in her arduous life. The third is a kind German man by the name of Hans. Quyen's physical and psychological pain and her strong will to survive on her own can be read as a metaphor for the hardship experienced by the Vietnamese people at the hands of Western powers as well as the will of the Vietnamese people to overcome such adversity. The film's characteristic style shows the current state of Vietnamese commercial films. This trope, in which collective crisis is substituted by the symbol of a woman, traps the film in sentimentalism. But when we read the film in terms of a woman overcoming an extreme ordeal, we can find a great deal more symbolism. (Busan International Film Festival)