Vietnam's golden era for silver screen

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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.