Don Duong stars as a truck driver who falls in love with a young student girl in a roadside border canteen. Unsure about him, she returns to school but finally decides to throw in her lot with him. This decision forms the gambling motif in the film, a decision which causes her grief, when she later becomes the subject of his gamble.

Toward the end of 1946, residents from all walks of Hanoi struggle to avoid—and eventually accept—the possibility of a full-blown war.

Fleeing the control of their authoritarian father, two women cross the border into China with a friend’s help.