Last Rain on My Parade
2024 · 25m · Vietnam
Directed by Huu Thanh Tran
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Trà, a quiet shampooer in Saigon, and Tuấn, her younger secret lover — a tech driver bound for Japan — only meet when it rains. As the rainy season ends and the country erupts in football fever, she asks him to take her out into one last street storm.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a rainy-season romance to wallow in mood, but Tran flips it—the rain becomes a *permission structure*, not atmosphere, which is genuinely weird and unexpectedly subversive about how constraint shapes desire.
The film positions itself squarely in the Vietnamese New Wave lineage of intimate social observation, with the seasonal deadline functioning as both narrative and formal principle—a structure that recalls the rigor of Hou Hsiao-hsien's approach to temporal collapse.
The decision to let the closing rainy season—marked by the intrusion of football crowds—become the actual heartbeat of the edit rather than just backdrop is what lifts this from sweet to aching; it's the kind of structural choice that costs nothing but costs everything.
Festivals
- CinemaSHORT Asian Short Film Competition 2025
- Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia 2025
- Apchat-Issoire International Film Festival 2025