Do Sanh
 

30 April 1996. The government in Ho Chi Minh City are celebrating the 21st anniversary of the victory of North Vietnam and the Vietcong over South Vietnam and its ally, America.
While the city celebrates, a 35-year-old drug addict dies of Aids in a hospital. When his wife goes to visit him the next day, nobody can put a name to the dead man. ”Do you mean the one with the bag attached to his stomach?” is their response.
One year later, on 30 April 1997, director Hans-Dieter Grabe went to Ho Chi Minh City with Vietnamese cinematographer Tran Dung Tien to complete a filmic chronicle of a man’s life spanning a period of 28 years.
Filming began in 1970 in the middle of the Vietnam war on board the German hospital ship ”Helgoland” in Da Nang. Among the ship’s patients was an eight-year-old boy whose parents had been killed by a grenade and who was himself critically injured by the same weapon. The doctor describes the boy’s injuries in an on camera interview: an artificial rectum had been constructed following the destruction of the boy’s own rectum; both his testicles had been torn to pieces and his bladder and urethra had been badly damaged, making Do Sanh an invalid for the rest of his life.