Buffalo Boy | Telescope Film
Buffalo Boy

Buffalo Boy (Mùa len trâu)

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  • Vietnam,
  • Belgium,
  • France
  • 2005
  • · 102m

Director Minh Nguyen-Vo
Cast Kim Long Thach, Thi Kieu Trinh Nguyen, The Lu Le, Huu Thanh Nguyen, Zan Sram Kra
Genre Drama

In the Southern Coast of Vietnam during the French occupation, 15 year old Kim lives with his father and stepmother, where their whole lives are dependent on two buffalo. When the rainy season comes and there is no grass for them to graze on, Kim embarks on a coming of age journey inland, experiencing a wide variety of life.

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What are critics saying?

80

The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

One of the strengths of Mr. Nguyen-Vo's film is that despite the overwhelming physical beauty of the landscape and the simplicity of his characters, he doesn't succumb to such aerated thinking. The world in Buffalo Boy" is filled with wonder, but it is a world also filled with real desire, real death, not abstractions.

70

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

Despite the exotic locale, this is a coming-of-age tale that should be familiar to anyone raised on the tales of Jack London or Robert Louis Stevenson.

70

Variety by Derek Elley

Sports a stronger narrative spine than is usual in Vietnamese rural dramas and a less fragile tone in its deployment of landscape and character.

70

Chicago Reader by Andrea Gronvall

The elegiac tone here isn't set just by nostalgia for a vanished lifestyle: bereavement, lost love, and the ever present floodwaters add poignancy to the elliptical story, whose characters float in and out unbidden, and sometimes unexplained.