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Vietnam movies from the Vietnamese perspective


So, as we all know, there are a ton of movies out there that are set in or somehow involve the Vietnam War... from the American perspective. Some of them glorify the war, others deplore it in one way or another, but always from the American perspective. There seem to be almost none that show the war from the perspective of Vietnam. Western movies almost never show anything outside of the Western perspective, the perspective of Western soldiers occupying other people's countries, even if such movies are sympathetic to the occupied people in a charitable, often condescending sort of way. These countries, whether Vietnam or Iraq or Korea or somewhere else, are treated more as a stage for Western stories than as countries in their own right whose people have their own views. There are some exceptions, such as The Battle of Algiers, that actually give voice to the "other side", but such movies are extremely rare. Generally, Westerners monopolize the narrative and make it only about themselves. Dissident films either convey the way Western troops suffer or how they feel guilty for causing suffering to the occupied population, but even then, the voice of the occupied is never actually heard. Some of those movies are good or great in their own ways, but they're still only the Western perspective and give no voice to those occupied by Western armies.

I did see one movie once, a joint Soviet-Vietnamese production from the mid-1980s called "Koordinaty Smerti" (Coordinates of Death), which was interesting in some ways and obviously well-intended but in general it just wasn't very good (and it didn't help that the movie had no English subtitles and my Russian is pretty poor). And i've heard that there were some other movies made in North Vietnam at the time, but i've never found them with English subtitles.

Another one that comes close to what i'm talking about is "The Quiet American" (2002), which is sort of in the Battle of Algiers category of movies. That one is set in the French war in Vietnam rather than the American one, but I still think it counts, because from Vietnam's perspective the French and American wars were two parts of the same national liberation/revolutionary war.

Does anyone know of and can recommend some other movies that show the war from the perspective of the Vietnamese people, the Viet Cong (or the earlier Viet Minh) and the North Vietnamese?

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I tried to add a Viet Cong perspective to The Siege Of Firebase Gloria (1988) See Trailers From Hell on the movie to understand how difficult that was. But I got some of what I wanted across. Sahara (1995) is a remake of the 1943 Bogie classic, with some attention paid to the Africa Korps.. Both film is covered in my new book ADVENTURES IN THE B MOVIE TRADE. Here's the trailer and website: https://briantrenchard-smith.com/
Best wishes in these difficult times!

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