Song of the Stork

Based on real-life events, the story revolves around five young North Vietnamese recruits: May is the insouciant joker of the lot, Manh is the earnest, under-aged innocent, Van is the romantic intellectual, while Lam, the spy, and Vinh, the war correspondent, are more fully-realised characters who are not so easily typified.

The movie starts in 2000, the 25th anniversary of the Liberation of Saigon, with the middle-aged Vinh and Lam playing themselves. Through flashbacks, the movie moves back and forth in time, beginning at the Xuan Mai training camp where the five young men met for the first time in 1968. As the five narratives unfold over the years — interspersed with grainy, yellowed footage of the Vietnam War — they are woven together and voiced-over by Vinh.