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The film “Letní škola, 2001” (Summer school, 2001) just hit cinemas in the Czech Republic. It tells the story of the different identity crises faced by some members of the now 80,000-strong Vietnamese community in the Czech Republic, from a Vietnamese perspective. The story takes place in 2001 on the Czech-German border in the city of Cheb, known back then for its street markets run by members of the Vietnamese community selling goods to visiting Germans and Czechs. Those markets operated in a gray area, selling pirated versions of brand-name clothes, goods such as tobacco, electronics that were often not declared to customs, and were thus financially competitive for buyers, and more. At the time, Czechoslovakia had just rediscovered a market economy, following the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and a wild-style capitalism was a defining feature of the period.
In the movie, a local Vietnamese family meets their son Kien, who was born in the Czech Republic but sent back to Vietnam for ten years. He returns with spiky red hair and little in common with his family. He feels unwelcome and ostracized by the Czech-Vietnamese community because of his looks. The story is told in three parts from the point of view of the younger brother, the father, and the elder brother Kien. The film follows Kien's journey home and the shock to the local community after Kien gets romantically involved with his male Czech language tutor, who is also Vietnamese.
Overall, the film illustrates the evolution of generations of Vietnamese who came or were born in Czechoslovakia and later in the Czech Republic. It was featured at the Czech Republic's most prestigious Karlovy Vary Film Festival in July 2025.
The first wave of Vietnamese migration to then-Czechoslovakia started in the 1960s as part of Socialist countries’ solidarity efforts to support economically less developed countries. Students and workers from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Mongolia, Cuba, and later from Socialist African countries were invited to study or work in countries of the Soviet bloc, including in Socialist Czechoslovakia.
The foreign students and workers were provided with free Czech language courses, housing in dorms, and offered positions in factories and universities, but expected to return to Vietnam to “build Socialism.” Many did so, but some also stayed, particularly after 1989, sometimes intermarrying with Czechs and Slovaks.
Today, in the Czech Republic, this community is estimated to be between 80,000 and 100,000 people strong (about 40,000 have Czech citizenship and 60,000 hold Vietnamese passports; while others hold dual citizenship), and the second generation is usually fluent in Czech and holds Czech citizenship. Traditionally, the community invested after 1989 in cheaper Asian restaurants and local grocery stores that stay open late at night. Those shops have become a symbol of how Vietnamese are perceived by the white Czech majority. Nail salons emerged later but are now equally popular within Vietnamese communities.
And while the first generation stayed largely within their small businesses and had little public visibility outside of them, the next generation is now emerging in all fields of Czech society, from politics to media, music to influencers, the medical and law fields, or blogging and journalism.
But as the second generation identifies strongly with Czech cultural codes, the first generation, often more conservative with traditional views, struggles to understand the value system of their children or even grandchildren. This is what motivated the filmmaker of “Letní škola, 2001,” Dužan Duong, to make a series of films on this issue.
Duong (Duong Viet Duc under his official name in Vietnamese) was born in 1991 in Vietnam, but was raised mostly in the Czech Republic where he studied economics, and very briefly at the famous film school of FAMU (the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, with famous alumni such as Milan Kundera, Miloš Forman, Emir Kusturica and others).
As he explains in this candid interview in Czech, he has his own conflict with his parents, and his movies are a way to communicate with them. It is a form of therapy: He mentions the fact that he wanted to provide a more realistic, uncensored view of the real life of Vietnamese families.
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Language is a key marker of identity within the community: Newcomers, or those like Kien who did not go to Czech school, struggle with a Slavonic language whose phonetics, grammar and syntax are extremely compelling for a speaker of a language that knows no tense, gender or cases markers; while those who attended Czech school speak like native speakers — but some are less familiar with or less fluent in Vietnamese.
The whole relationship between Kien and Viktor, his Vietnamese Czech language tutor, is based on their different positioning regarding the Czech and Vietnamese languages and gives the name to the movie. The summer school represents how many migrant families, particularly those from East Asia, where Confucian tradition encourages and values education, strongly emphasize educating the next generation.
The movie mixes Vietnamese and Czech languages, as can be seen in its trailer:
As is often the case, older members of diasporas can be more conservative compared to people of their age in their country of origin. This is particularly true in regard to the issue of queer rights and identity. As this 28-year-old Czech-Vietnamese interviewed by the news portal Seznam.cz explains:
In this podcast, Barbora Nováková, a scholar in Vietnamese studies based at Prague's Charles University explains that when the first generation left Vietnam, homosexuality was considered one of the social “evils” such as drug consumption, which explains why, according to her, it is still extremely challenging for queer Czech-Vietnamese to come out, particularly within their families and community.
Overall, it seems values and language are at the heart of the debate for second-generation Czech-Vietnamese as they gain visibility in mainstream Czech society and get to shape their own identity, as Czech-Vietnamese fashion designer Anna Tran sums up in the same Seznam.cz article:
[Global Voice/NS]
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