A young man crosses a city square in the early morning fog. He rings the doorbell of his childhood home and an untrusting stranger answers the door... This portrait of a returning soldier resonates with the sadness and alienation also felt by American veterans; Brothers and Relations might be the Vietnamese version of Hemingway's "Soldier's Home," for like that story it dispells the myth of the hero's welcome among a civilian population that really can't abide the "hero's" experience. In returning to a Hanoi that, in its desire to move on, affects indifference to the war, Hien finds himself unable to fit in and repulsed by the corruption that has eaten its way into even the family structure. (His "take care of everything" sister-in-law is really a maven of the black market, his friends experts at "spreading around the bills" to get even the simplest job.) Hien's family surreptitiously removes the black ribbon from his portrait on his return; his friends greet him sheepishly, "I thought you were..." In the end, Hien too identifies with the war's dead, far more than with its corrupt survivors, in this sensitive portrait of one man's war that is also our own.