2025 has begun very early with the atmosphere of preparation for the grand ceremony towards the 50th anniversary of the Liberation of the South and National Reunification Day. We have to contact history experts, researchers to the war film crew, performing artists... early to get their stories about past memories, about their youth, about what they have witnessed, or listened to, and recorded with their families and generations.
We know that, turning the past miserable again, there will be even proud stories about national history, but there will also be tears, there will be private emotions about the fate of people in wartime. We can partly predict the content and atmosphere of the stories that will be listened to from the characters, but the fact that those stories can haunt us, make us cry for many minutes in the studio... is something we cannot predict.
In mid-April 2025, the atmosphere towards the 50th anniversary of the Liberation of the South and National Reunification has spread widely with heroism, national spirit as if multiplied by celebrations and proud melodies. We invited to the studio - People's Artist Thanh Hoa - who had a young age to sing along with Truong Son to serve the military forces fighting in the historic Ho Chi Minh campaign.
The script was prepared, but when mentioning Truong Son, People's Artist Thanh Hoa seemed to forget the question, her memories of her youth flooded out of all the contents of the talk show. She mentioned her teammates who sacrificed in Truong Son, mentioned the "unendingly young" soldiers in the forest that year, mentioned the times when they stood singing in tears, unable to speak because "our team was so injured", "there was so much sacrifice in that match"... As I told him, People's Artist Thanh Hoa cried. Her memories made us - those present at the studio - silent.
Perhaps, during many years of implementing talk shows with all kinds of different topics, the studio on the 7th floor of the Lao Dong Newspaper headquarters has never been so quiet, never with so many tears, for both the character and the production crew.
A generation of very young soldiers has steadfastly stayed in Truong Son so that other generations can rise up, said Peoples Artist Thanh Hoa.
She cried and said, "There are sayings - that for the younger generation now - seem very theoretical, for example, the saying, let's respect peace for peace has had to be exchanged for a lot of blood from our ancestors. We had to go through a war like us, witness the fierceness with our own eyes, to realize that that saying had to be summarized by the whole war.
Writer Bao Ninh once said, a person who comes out of a war - they will forever change, will never be able to return to being human before - before the war begins. War will forever be a wound, a persistent obsession.
Director Bui Thac Chuyen has spent many years researching, going to the Cu Chi site to study and meet veterans, "eating and lying" in the site for many years, to build a script and start the film project "Tunnel: Sun in the dark".
In a conversation with us, director Bui Thac Chuyen said, I have heard many war stories - told by veterans themselves. The war is more painful and loss than we can imagine. There are very terrible stories.... (calm down).
But above all, it is the extraordinary situation in the way the Vietnamese people and soldiers face and fight. No matter how long the war lasts, no matter how fierce it is, no matter how strong the enemy is, modern weapons sway day and night, our army and people still stick to it, still have the strength to fight steadfastly and persistently, not a single go, not a single go, not a single go - and that is the way to victory for us".
geography: Sun in the dark does not have the great scenes, battle lines, and tragic, magnificent or eye-catching fights like the war films of England and America often see. The film does not have "competitions", competitions about weapons, equipment, tactics, and strategies.
geography: Sun in the dark made us cry just because of the scenes of living, eating, and traveling in the dark tunnel of the campaign company. An unbalanced war between one side is the world's most powerful military force, equipped with advanced weapons, and the other side is the "land-forward" candidates, gathering the enemy's own weapons to defeat the enemy. The war was full of haunting and tragedy.
The conversation with director Bui Thac Chuyen, with People's Artist Thanh Hoa, with veterans who participated in the fight in the land of Cu Chi... seems to have turned us into... sensitive people.
Just a month before, we were still people in a hurry to live, hurried with the constant rotation of pressure from the modern rhythm of life. The historic April days of 2025 suddenly became a "slow pace of life", bringing us to meetings where we were moved, moved, and cried - in a way that none of us expected.
Musician Nguyen Van Chung - author of the song "Continuing the story of peace" that reached billions of views across social platforms, said, "Love for the nation, love for the country is always present in us like a melody. The national anthem, the anthem of pride and pride, the anthem of eternal love for history, the people... will always explode strongly, when someone touches them".
The national anthem has been strongly played on the pen of each of us in the historic April. Each meeting, each story, each character brings us to "touch" history, to the land of sports medicine memories - never sleeping peacefully - of the whole nation, so that we can be moved, cry in the atmosphere of "the whole country's happy days of going out", "the way to the match this season is very beautiful, Truong Son Dong misses Truong Son Tay"...
