Newspapers
2024 · 14m · USA
Directed by Vu Hoang
Genres: drama
Tones: melancholic, tender
A Vietnamese immigrant mother delivers newspapers at dawn with her young son in 1990s America; years later, the grown son — fatally wounded — calls her in his final moments.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Using the unglamorous intimacy of pre-dawn newspaper delivery as its emotional anchor, this film finds the whole weight of an immigrant family's sacrifice in a single dying phone call.
Dying son calls Vietnamese immigrant mom, flashbacks to dawn paper routes — every beat is telegraphed three frames before it arrives. Sincerity is not a free pass on construction.
Hoang collapses immigrant generational trauma into a single phone call between dying son and mother — the Minari emotional palette compressed to fourteen minutes. The 4am newspaper-route memory is genuinely specific.
Festivals
- Viet Film Fest 2024