Vietnam’s 2025 Cultural Reboot: It Wasn’t Just Fireworks
It’s 11 PM on New Year’s Eve. I’m sitting in a small coffee shop in District 1, Ho Chi Minh City, trying to find a quiet corner while the rest of the city prepares to explode into 2026. Looking back at the last twelve months, it feels like Vietnam didn’t just host events; it sprinted through a marathon of cultural assertions.
If you were here this year, you know exactly what I mean. The energy was frantic, messy, and occasionally brilliant.
I’ve spent the better part of 2025 hopping between Hanoi, Da Nang, and HCMC, trying to keep up with a calendar that seemed determined to make up for every quiet year of the last decade. We had major anniversaries, weird tech experiments in ancient citadels, and a film industry that finally started throwing elbows on the international stage.
Here’s my breakdown of what actually mattered this year—not the press release version, but the reality on the ground.
The 50-Year Shadow (and the Light Show)
You can’t talk about 2025 without addressing the elephant in the room: the 50th Anniversary of the Liberation of the South and National Reunification.
I was in downtown Saigon on April 30. The heat was oppressive—standard for April—but the sheer scale of the logistics was what caught my attention. Usually, these state anniversaries follow a rigid script: speeches, parades, more speeches. And sure, we had that. But the shift in execution was palpable.
The drone light show over the Saigon River wasn’t just a gimmick; it was a technical flex. We’re talking thousands of drones synchronized to tell a historical narrative. I remember standing near the Bach Dang Wharf, neck craned up, thinking about the coding nightmare that must have been running on the backend to keep those things from crashing into the Bitexco tower.
It signaled a change in how Vietnam wants to present its history: less dusty textbook, more cyberpunk spectacle. It worked. The crowds were younger, more engaged, and significantly louder than I’ve seen in previous years.
Digitizing the Ancients
This is where the “technical” part of cultural management really showed its teeth this year. I visited the Temple of Literature in Hanoi back in October, and the night tour—Tinh Hoa Dao Hoc—had evolved significantly since its pilot runs.
We saw a massive push in 2025 towards what the industry calls “heritage digitization.” It sounds boring, I know. But seeing 3D mapping technology projected onto centuries-old stone stelae is actually kind of wild.
The government threw serious weight behind the National Target Program on Culture this year. The goal? To stop treating heritage sites like static museums and start treating them like interactive data sets.
I spoke to a developer working on one of the VR projects for the Hue Citadel. He looked exhausted. He told me the hardest part wasn’t the rendering, but the historical accuracy constraints. They were mapping bullet holes from 1968 and cracks from 1800s floods with millimeter precision. This isn’t just tourism; it’s digital preservation against climate change, which, let’s be honest, is coming for these heritage sites fast.
The Film Festival Circuit Got Serious
I managed to catch a few screenings during the film festival season, and the vibe has shifted. For years, it felt like Vietnamese cinema was stuck in a loop of slapstick comedies or tragic war dramas.
2025 broke that loop.
The international film festivals held here this year—particularly the one in Da Nang—showcased a new wave of filmmakers who are technically proficient and narratively aggressive. We saw films tackling urban isolation, AI ethics, and historical revisionism.
The industry infrastructure is finally catching up. We aren’t just importing blockbusters anymore; local production houses are investing in virtual production stages (think The Mandalorian style LED walls). I saw a set in District 7 that looked like it belonged in Hollywood, not a converted warehouse in Saigon. The result? The production value on the screen has skyrocketed.
The “Creative City” Isn’t Just a Buzzword Anymore
Hanoi joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network a while back, but 2025 was the year they actually had to prove they deserved the badge.
I spent a week in November wandering around the creative design festivals in the capital. They reactivated old industrial spaces—factories that had been sitting rotting for decades—and turned them into art spaces.
The logistics of this are a nightmare. You’re dealing with structural safety issues, fire codes, and a bureaucracy that famously moves at the speed of a glacier. Yet, they pulled it off. The Gia Lam Train Factory transformation was the highlight for me. Standing in a gritty, grease-stained workshop looking at contemporary installation art felt like a genuine cultural moment, not a manufactured tourist trap.
It’s messy, though. The traffic was horrendous, the signage was confusing, and half the time I didn’t know if I was allowed to be where I was standing. But that’s the charm. It felt organic.
The UNESCO Push
We also saw a relentless drive for new UNESCO recognitions this year. It feels like a stamp of approval the country is desperate to collect.
The dossier for the Festival of Ba Chua Xu Lady in An Giang was a major talking point. I’ve been to this festival before—it is chaotic, loud, and incredibly intense. Turning that raw, spiritual energy into a sterile application for a UN body is a weird process. It forces a community to codify things that are meant to be fluid.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, the recognition brings protection and funding. On the other, it risks turning living culture into a performance for outsiders. But watching the local committees work through the application process this year, I have to respect the hustle. They view culture as a resource, same as oil or rice, and they are maximizing it.
A Note on the Logistics
Let’s talk about the boring stuff that makes these things happen. The infrastructure strain in 2025 was real.
During the major holidays, the airports were absolute zoos. Tan Son Nhat is still struggling to handle the volume, even with the constant renovations. If you tried to fly anywhere around April 30 or September 2, you probably have a horror story to tell.
However, the ticketing systems have improved. Most major cultural sites have finally ditched the paper ticket stubs for QR codes. It’s a small thing, but not having to stand in a physical line to buy a piece of paper in 35-degree heat is a victory in my book.
Looking to 2026
So, where does that leave us as the clock ticks down?
Vietnam in 2025 proved it can handle the big, flashy stuff. The drone shows, the international festivals, the diplomatic anniversaries. The challenge for 2026 is going to be sustainability. You can’t run on adrenaline and anniversary hype forever.
The culture sector needs to figure out how to keep the lights on in those “creative spaces” when the festival banners come down. They need to ensure that the digitized heritage data is actually accessible to students, not just locked on a server somewhere.
But for tonight? I’m going to finish this coffee, walk down to the river, and watch one last fireworks display. It’s been a hell of a year.
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