Set in contemporary Vietnam, this cinematic tone poem offers vignettes from five overlapping lives -- a pretty vendor of lotus blossoms, a sensitive cyclo driver, a sloe-eyed prostitute, a street kid, and a chain-smoking ex-Marine searching for his daughter. The film opens with a landscape of white lotus shrouded in morning mist and closes with a tropical shower of red blossoms raining down on lovers. In between, there is beauty and kindness in unexpected places.

Havi Hoffman