Based on a well-known novel of the same title by author Duong Huong, “Wharf of Widows” reflects stories in the context of a rural Village called Dong – a typical North Vietnamese village with bamboo ramparts, communal house roofs, banyan trees and wharves. It was a time when the north hurried to build up the countryside and support the southern battlefield. The movie takes us back to the olden days of peaceful northern villages and women waiting for their men to return from the battlefield. The war robbed the village of healthy strong men leaving behind the women who waited at the water’s edge.
Mai is an art student who is invited to act in a movie set in the war. Along with acting and studying, she is in the midst of the complexities of her family background, social life and personal ambitions. Powerful, free-spirited, rebellious, struggling and thoughtful, Forgive Me is like a chorus of young people living in the early 90s in Hanoi.
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.