Vietnam’s golden era for silver screen

HANOI

For most of the past 30 years, Vietnam’s moviegoers have had little choice but to watch homegrown communist propaganda films peddling moral messages for the masses.

However, as the country has opened up in recent years, so has its film industry. Now Hollywood blockbusters are sharing billing with local features that increasingly deal with themes to which the country’s aspiring youth can relate.

In the three years since the government opened the industry to the private sector, Vietnam has seen leisure spending take off, swept along by economic growth that topped 8 percent last year and a young population — two-thirds of the country’s people are younger than 30.

“Cinema is an entertainment they can be proud of, a way of showing off, of being trendy,” says Phan To Hong Hai, marketing manager from Thien Ngan-Galaxy, a production company and distributor.

In May last year, the firm opened a three-screen complex in the southern business hub of Ho Chi Minh City, a major development in a country that has barely 60 screens nationwide.

On April 26, an eight-screen cineplex with more than 1,100 seats opened in the capital, Hanoi, operated by Ha Noi Megastar Media JV Vietnam, a joint venture between British Virgin Island-based Envoy Media Partners Ltd. and Vietnam’s Phuong Nam Corp.

It promises to bring movies from studios including United International Pictures and Walt Disney Pictures.

“Megastar will be able to bring the latest movies to Vietnamese audiences at the same time with other countries in the region,” says Edward Shrugue, managing director of Envoy Media and chief executive of Megastar Media.

At the end of the war and reunification in 1976, “cinema had become an art and industry entirely funded and managed by the state,” explains Benjamin Saglio, attache for audio-visual culture to the French embassy in Hanoi.

However, state productions ran out of steam in the 1990s because of a lack of funding and the government’s diversion of funds to sectors deemed more important to national development.

A lack of fresh ideas and an outdated perception of film also were at fault.

“Films still focused on the war with melodramatic productions. Audiences started to lose interest,” Mr. Saglio says.

When the industry was first opened in 2002 and 2003, new actors began to appear on the scene.

Hanoi-based BHD, a subsidiary of the Vietnam Media Corp., moved into production and distribution, while the South Korean firm Good Fellas opened its Diamond Multiplex Cinema (DMC) in Ho Chi Minh City, showing U.S. blockbusters, South Korean and Hong Kong movies and some Vietnamese productions.

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