SEPTEMBER 18-OCTOBER 30

American filmmakers aren’t the only one who began to explore the Vietnam war and its aftermath in the ’80s. So did their Vietnamese counterparts, in films that sometimes echo the themes of American-made Vietnam War movies. The eight movies in this series include such universal scenarios as the soldier’s return to a society that just wants to forget the war and the people who fought it (Brothers and Relations, Oct. 18 at 2 p.m.) and an officer’s discovery that his wife, assuming him dead, has remarried (The Wild Reed, Oct. 30 at 7 p.m.). Included are historical dramas like Hanoi—Winter 1946, which recounts the beginning of Ho Chi Minh’s guerrilla war against the French (Oct. 4 at 2 p.m.); satires of postwar corruption like The Retired General (Sept. 20 at 2 p.m.); and anti-war parables like Fairy Tale for 17-Year-Olds, in which new love is interrupted by mobilization (Sept. 27 at 2 p.m.). One of the selections that has screened before in Washington is the poignant When the Tenth Month Comes, in which a peasant woman tries to hide the death of her soldier husband, then finds that the man she enlisted to fabricate letters from her lost spouse has actually fallen in love with her (Oct. 16 at 7 p.m.). The series opens with Misfortune’s End, (pictured, Sept. 18 at 7 p.m.), in which a woman’s business success changes her relationship with her estranged husband. At the Freer Gallery’s Meyer Auditorium, 12th & Jefferson Dr. SW. Free. (202) 357-3200. (Mark Jenkins)