The Owl and Sparrow is a great effort of a Viet Kieu.
It's a moving story of a 10 year old orphan who ran away from her cold-hearted uncle to the hustle and bustle of Saigon and ended up making friends with a flight attendant and a zoo keeper. One was stuck in relationship with the captain who was married. One locked himself up in the world of animals trying to get over his ex girlfriend. In the middle of an 8 million populated city, they found each other.
The beginning of the movie is a little bit too unnecessarily shaky and hard to watch but it gets better as the story goes on. The dialogues are fairly good for a script written by a half Vietnamese American though there are lines that are a bit unnatural.
The film looks like a documentary which makes it real and lively. Honestly if I hadn't read about the movie and downloaded it, I would have thought it was a pure Vietnamese film made by a Vietnamese filmmaker.
I would not say much about the leading actors and actresses as for a film like this, their acting is probably enough to make the story believable.
Owl and Sparrow is not some kind of a must see but would be interesting to those who are an expat in Vietnam, used to live in Vietnam or has any relation to this lovely country.
