This article explores ways in which post-war Vietnamese cinema and literature visualize the conflict and trauma of the American War in Vietnam. As Vietnamese writers and directors search for new creative forms to capture adequately the complexity of war experiences, they increasingly remove the conflict from the paradigms of triumph and victory to explore it instead within the paradigms of loss, suffering and trauma. By exposing and validating multifaceted individual war memories, they mount an effective challenge to the established official canon of war literature and cinema in Vietnam and serve as a powerful means of dissent. This article gives special consideration to the Vietnamese film Sống trong số hãi [Living in Fear], released in 2005, which attempts to reconstruct the genre of war film in Vietnam by accentuating humanism and downplaying nationalism and ideology.
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