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DON'T BURN

By Minh DANG NHAT

VIETNAM MEDIA CORP. / BHD CO, LTD - as SALES All rights, World

Drama - Completed 2009

"Last night, I dreamed of peace"

- Year of production
- 2009
- Genres
- Drama
- Countries
- VIETNAM
- Languages
- VIETNAMESE, ENGLISH
- Budget
- 0 - 0.3 M$
- Duration
- 90 mn
- Director(s)
- Minh DANG NHAT
- Writer(s)
- Minh DANG NHAT
- Cast
- Mathew M. KORSCH
- Producer(s)
- Ngat NGUYEN HONG (Cinemas Association )
- Synopsis
- At the age of twenty-four, Dang Thuy Tram volunteered to serve as a doctor in a National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) battlefield hospital in the Quang Ngai Province. Two years later she was killed by American forces not far from where she worked.
  Written between 1968 and 1970, her diary speaks poignantly of her devotion to family and friends, the horrors of war, her yearning for her high school sweetheart, and her struggle to prove her loyalty to her country. At times raw, at times lyrical and youthfully sentimental, her voice transcends cultures to speak of her dignity and compassion and of her challenges in the face of the war’s ceaseless fury.
  The American officer who discovered the diary soon after Dr. Tram’s death was under standing orders to destroy all documents without military value. As he was about to toss it into the flames, the Vietnamese translator said to him, “Don’t burn this one. . . . It has fire in it already.” Against regulations, the officer preserved the diary and kept it for thirty-five years.
  The diary was soon published in Vietnam, causing a national sensation, and then translated into English under the name Last Night I Dream of Peace by Andrew X. Pham with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize winner Frances Fitzgerald. The book was published on September 11, 2007 by the Random Publishing House, one of the largest publishing houses in the US.
  The film covers the very long journey of the legend diary when it was first written by Dr. Tram until it made its fateful way to her elderly mother in Hanoi in the spring of 2005.