Leon Le on Reframing Vietnam Beyond the Western Gaze: ‘Vietnamese Stories Have Been Told Through a Dated, Disrespectful, Ignorant Lens’

By Essie Assibu

Essie Assibu

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For director Leon Le, the problem isn’t a lack of stories about Vietnam, instead it’s how they’ve been told. “Vietnamese stories have been told through a very dated, very disrespectful, ignorant lens,” he says.

His sophomore film, “Ky Nam Inn,” in competition in the features section of the Fribourg International Film Festival, returns to 1980s Saigon, following a translator, a war widow and her young son in the years after reunification.

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