A young cadre of the state is in the board of a re-education programme for bourgeoisies, but the object of its "rehabilitation" turns out to be her mother-in-law who moved South after 1954.

An undercover spy of the Revolution approaches a ruthless guard at Côn Đảo prison to extract information.

In post-war Vietnam, a talented piano student and doctor in training begin a doomed love affair.

A woman manages to escape from the Khmer Rouge labour camp. Saved from drowning in river by a group of Vietnamese soldiers, she decided to join them.

Hai Cũ, a notorious outlaw robbing from the rich to give to the poor, writes to Hồ Chí Minh hoping to secure pardon for his subordinates and is then sent to work as a foreman for a military company. The company's officer turns out to be the student who has accidentally helped him to escape the police many years ago.

Follows a young cyclo driver on his poverty-driven descent into criminality in modern-day Ho Chi Minh City. The boy's struggles to scratch out a living for his two sisters and grandfather in the mean streets of the city lead to petty crime on behalf of a mysterious Madame from whom he rents his cyclo.

After the war a young woman from Saigon goes to the countryside at the call of the government to teach love of country to the local people. There she finds that she doesn't really believe in what she teaches, that she's not really interested in the butterflies and birds of the poems she recites and is terribly bored in the countryside.