Krigets Sorger

The Vietnamese author, Bao Ninh, believes that “In warfare, there are no victors, there are only the vanquished”. His novel Sorrows of war has recently allowed us to discover an autobiographical view of the events which marked his entire generation. The book’s simple and distressing tone has irritated the regime in power because if, in the author’s mind, war was inevitable and had to be won by the Vietnamese, it was also the cause of terrible suffering. The film mixes interviews – Bao Ninh and his colleague Duong Thu Huong, who gives accounts of the ordeals the women suffered – and sequences shot during the fighting in North Vietnam, where Swedish television crews were able to continue working.