The Scent of Green Papaya

The Scent of Green Papaya (Mùi đu đủ xanh, 1993) is a Vietnamese-language French production you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Trần Anh Hùng. The film took the Caméra d'Or at Cannes and went on to compete for the Academy Award for Best International Feature — the first Vietnamese film ever to do so. Almost nothing about it was shot in Vietnam: Hùng reconstructed 1950s Saigon entirely inside a Paris studio, working from photographs and childhood recollections.

Mui is ten years old when she arrives in a prosperous Saigon household to work as a servant. She moves quietly through the rooms and the garden — watching the papaya ripen, the lizards on the walls, a family's grief and its money troubles — taking in everything without judgment. Years pass. The film follows her into a second household, where the young pianist she has known since childhood works and lives.

Hùng strips the film down to almost no dialogue and very little conventional plot movement. It rewards patience and resists summary — closer to a sustained mood than a story with beats. For viewers who come to it on those terms, it's one of the more striking works of 1990s Asian cinema. Stream The Scent of Green Papaya (1993) online on iFILM.