Xa Loi Pagoda takes its name from the relic of the Buddha enshrined there, and it was built in a deliberately modern idiom: clean lines, a spacious upper hall raised above the street, and a tall bell tower that remains its landmark in a dense central district of Ho Chi Minh City. Its place in history was fixed in 1963. During the Buddhist crisis that convulsed South Vietnam, Xa Loi became the organising centre of the protest movement and the focus of international attention, before government forces raided the pagoda and arrested monks inside — an episode that carried consequences far beyond the walls of the compound. The film holds both dimensions together. It covers the architecture and the ordinary religious life of the place, the chanting, the offerings, the classes and the flow of visitors, and it tells the story that made a modern pagoda a political landmark. For programmers, it combines a sacred-sites subject with twentieth-century history, and works within strands on Vietnam, on religion and power, or on Cold War Asia.
