DIRECTOR Hong Khaou follows his debut feature, the Sundance critical hit “Lilting,” with “Monsoon,” which premieres Saturday in competition at Karlovy Vary Film Festival. The film stars “Crazy Rich Asians” lead Henry Golding and Parker Sawyers.

“Monsoon” follows a Vietnamese-born British guy Kit, played by Golding, as he travels with the ashes of his parents to Vietnam, which they left when he was a child in the turbulent aftermath of the Vietnam War. In Ho Chi Minh City, a bustling commercial metropolis, he meets American entrepreneur Lewis, played by Sawyers, and the two of them tentatively develop a relationship, at first sexual and then romantic.

Kit spends time exploring the city, with the assistance of his cousin, Lee, whose parents decided to stay in Vietnam, and then travels to Hanoi, where he hangs out with Linh (Molly Harris), a Vietnamese student who embodies the ambitious spirit of the young generation, despite feeling constrained by her family’s traditional values.

The film began to take shape when “Lilting” played in Sundance, and the prestigious Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab suggested Khaou pitch them an idea for his next project. In the four years that followed, with the support of the BFI and BBC Films, the pic underwent “various incarnations,” Khaou says.

Like Kit’s family, Khaou’s parents fled Southeast Asia when he was young — in their case from Cambodia — and he too grew up in Britain, but he wanted to distance himself a little from the film.

While Kit’s initial focus is on his search for traces of his family’s past in Vietnam — thanks to the influence of Lewis and Linh — he becomes immersed in the emerging modern, cosmopolitan Vietnam, fighting to free itself from its past.

(SD-Agencies)