Winner of the special prize from the Youth Jury at the Locarno Film Festival and the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) award for best foreign-language film, Nguyen-Vo Nghiem-Minh’s Buffalo Boy is a coming-of-age story inspired by Son Nam’s Scent of Ca Mau Forest. In French colonial Indochina around 1940, as the rainy season approaches, fifteen-year-old Kim is entrusted with the task of taking his family’s prized buffalo from the flooded lowlands to higher ground to graze. The difficult and dangerous journey propels the boy into manhood. “The world in Buffalo Boy is filled with wonder, but it is a world also filled with real desire, real death, not abstractions” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times).

Kate MacKay