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Khoi, a naive twenty-year-old, travels to Ho Chi Minh City from the countryside to begin a new life. It's his first time in the big city and he's looking for a place to live. He befriends Dong, a handsome extrovert who offers to share his apartment. When Khoi goes to check the place out, he meets Lam, who also appears to be living there. Khoi decides to stay, but while he showers, Dong and Lam - who turn out to be boyfriends - run off with all his cash and belongings. It's not long before Lam is himself abandoned by Dong, and winds up back on the street as a prostitute. Meanwhile the penniless and disillusioned Khoi takes on menial jobs to survive. Lam and Khoi are eventually reunited, and despite Lam's past actions, the two become closer and closer - even though Khoi becomes more and more troubled by Lam's dangerous source of income. At the same time, Cuoi, a mentally handicapped man abandoned by his family, attempts to befriend a female prostitute. Her pimps do not take kindly to his hanging around and scaring away customers, but she takes pity on him and ultimately becomes his protector.

Wartime epic involving a poverty-stricken family who struggle to make ends meet, and the mother who does the unthinkable to provide her daughters with the traditional silk dresses required to attend school.

The film portrays the life of a family separated from the mainstream of modern society, yet containing within its microcosm the complex layers and dramas of human relationship: conjugal life, sexual trauma, and the failures and bonds of fatherhood, brother and sisterhood. The film is about a unique social stratum in a remote place in Vietnam with unspoken traditions, customs and lifestyles. But most of all, it is the universal story of a family that like all other families have to find the strength and direction in each other to navigate their way through the choices and consequences that make up human existence. Based on Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tu's best selling short story "Boundless Rice Field", winner of the best short story prize from the Vietnam Writer's Association in 2007 and the ASEAN Literature Award recently, Floating Lives will draw audiences into the colourful daily life of unsophisticated peasants scratching out a living in the beautiful but forgiving landscape of the immense, mysterious and prescient Mekong Delta, characters whose strength, flaws and beauty, as they search for the sustenance of life and love, tear at one's heart.

In an old house in Hanoi, Bi, a 6-year-old child lives with his parents, his aunt and their cook. His favorite playgrounds are an ice factory and the wild grass along the river. After being absent for years, his grandfather, seriously ill, reappears and settles at their house. While Bi gets closer to his grandfather, his father tries to avoid any contact with his family. Every night, he gets drunk and goes and see his masseuse, for whom he feels a quiet strong desire. Bi's mother turns a blind eye on it. The aunt, still single, meets a 16-year-old young boy in the bus. Her attraction to him moves her deeply.