The Third Wife (2018)
Ash Mayfair
96 minutes, Vietnam
DCP

Vietnamese spoken
English subtitles

Saturday, 27-07
22:00
Drijvend Paviljoen

As part of our Same Same but Different programme, you can also watch The Scent of Green Papaya (1993) in LantarenVenster for the Made in Vietnam special.

The Third Wife (2018)

Ash Mayfair • 96 minutes • Vietnam

For wives should always be lovers too.”In 19th century rural Vietnam, a young teenager called May (Nguyen Phuong Tra My) becomes the third wife of wealthy landowner Hung (Le Vu Long). She soon learns that she can only gain status by asserting herself as a woman who can give birth to a male child. Her new husband favours her and she soon gets pregnant. Faced with forbidden love and its devastating consequences, May finally comes to an understanding of the brutal truth: the options available to her are few and far between.

With her delicate and sensual first feature film, Ash Mayfair made quite an entrance in the world of cinema. Mayfair was educated in London and New York. She worked in theater production and made a few short films. She started developing her first feature length film The Third Wife while she was attending the NYU film graduate program. Her script won various prizes, including the Spike Lee Film Production Award. And besides, she was mentored by one of Vietnam’s biggest names: director Trần Anh Hùng himself.

As his voice is clearly present in this gorgeous mature first film, we screen Hùng’s first feature film: The Scent of Green Papaya (1993) together with The Third Wife in our special program Same Same but Different.