The Floating Lives

The film portrays the life of a family separated from the mainstream of modern society, yet containing within its microcosm the complex layers and dramas of human relationship: conjugal life, sexual trauma, and the failures and bonds of fatherhood, brother and sisterhood. The film is about a unique social stratum in a remote place in Vietnam with unspoken traditions, customs and lifestyles. But most of all, it is the universal story of a family that like all other families have to find the strength and direction in each other to navigate their way through the choices and consequences that make up human existence. Based on Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tu's best selling short story "Boundless Rice Field", winner of the best short story prize from the Vietnam Writer's Association in 2007 and the ASEAN Literature Award recently, Floating Lives will draw audiences into the colourful daily life of unsophisticated peasants scratching out a living in the beautiful but forgiving landscape of the immense, mysterious and prescient Mekong Delta, characters whose strength, flaws and beauty, as they search for the sustenance of life and love, tear at one's heart.—Nguyen Phan Quang Binh