The Trailer

The Cannon and the Flower" is a documentary on Vietnam's remarkable musical family featuring Thai Thi Lien and her son, concert pianist Dang Thai Son. Madame Lien salvaged a single piano abandoned by the French in Hanoi and co-founded a music conservatory in the wake of the First Indochina War. In 1965, as bombs hailed on Hanoi, Dang Thai Son and Madame Lien, his first piano teacher, fled with a piano in tow to the mountains for a decade of dangerous, primitive music education. A few years after the war, Son would be the first Asian to win an international contest, the Chopin International Piano Competition, and rise to international stardom.