Indochine

Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Indochine, Régis Wargnier offers an interpretation of French colonialism in Indochina through the lens of a French plantation owner, Éliane Devries, played by Catherine Deneuve, and her adopted Vietnamese daughter Camille, played by Linh Dan Pham. In 1930, marked by growing anticolonial unrest, Éliane Devries, a single woman born to French parents in colonial Indochina, runs her and her widowed father's (Henri Marteau) large rubber plantationwith many indentured laborers, whom she casually refers to as her "coolies." She divides her days between her homes at the plantation and outside Saigon. After her best friends die in a plane crash, she adopts their five-year-old daughter Camille. Guy Asselin, the head of the French security services in Indochina, courts Éliane Devries, but she rejects him and raises Camille alone giving her the education of a privileged European through her teens. They live peacefully together until the arrival of French naval lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Le Guen. Camille soon parts with her mother to follow Le Guen, and the young lovers  join the nationalist cause. After Camille's arrest, Éliane raises her grandson in France.