Frames as Windows on Yesterday : Movies: Young Vietnamese Americans can connect with their roots through films such as ‘Green Papaya.’

While watching “The Scent of Green Papaya” by Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh Hung on Wednesday at UC Irvine, 18-year-old James Nguyen said, he kept thinking of his dad. The elder Nguyen, patriarch of a clan including three sons and two daughters, was among the thousands of refugees who fled Vietnam at war’s end 20 years ago.

Nguyen said his father made a good life for his family in Fountain Valley but often talks about how beautiful his homeland was before the fighting began.

“I was watching this movie, and all the times he spoke about the towns and jungles kept coming back,” said Nguyen, a UC Irvine student. “I guess he wanted us to remember [our roots], and seeing this makes me wonder about that.”

Nguyen, now a Costa Mesa resident, joined a crowd of about 200 at the screening in UCI’s Student Center. His reaction was what Pham Cao Duong, a UCI lecturer on Vietnamese history and culture and former University of Saigon professor, had expected.

Pham introduced “The Scent of Green Papaya” and talked afterward about the 1994 film, which won the Camera d’Or for best first feature at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign-language film. It is set in Saigon in 1961 and focuses on a girl who grows up in servitude and falls in love with her employer.

“It’s important for [the younger generation of Vietnamese] to see this and other movies like it because they get some explanations about what our culture was and is,” he said in an interview before the screening, the third of four in the “Multiculturalism Goes to the Movies!” series sponsored by the city of Irvine’s Intercultural Advisory Committee and the UCI Film Society. “I find that they love it [because it connects] with what their mothers and fathers have told them about the past.”

Pham, who left South Vietnam during the U.S. evacuation in 1975 and lives in Huntington Beach, said the country portrayed in “Green Papaya” is far different from what most Americans envision.

“This is not about a Vietnam torn by war. . . . This is not the Vietnam of Oliver Stone,” the director of “Platoon” and “Heaven and Earth,” said Pham, 58. “It is a film about the old Vietnam before it was destroyed by the revolution. It’s about common people and common places.”

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In fact, Tran’s camera rarely strays from the comfortable home, dwelling on the intimate moments of their days.

The movie’s charm and value, Pham noted, can be found in its ability to evoke the “Oriental tranquillity” of the time. While young Vietnamese Americans fully assimilated into fast-paced American culture might find it “too slow and too quiet,” Pham said that Tran’s deliberateness makes a point.

Much of the action, however muted, revolves around the kitchen where the heroine learns to cook and care for the household. Tran lingers over the bubbling wok, turning the process into a ritual that says something about the yearning for stability and order in the Vietnamese personality, Pham said.

“His camera becomes his eyes, looking deeply into the culture and creating a world that is the family kitchen,” Pham said. “The kitchen and making the food was, in so many aspects, the center of Vietnamese life.”

The series closes Wednesday with Juzo Itami’s “Tampopo.”

The 1986 comedy mixes noodle-making, a love story and a hero of Clint Eastwood proportions to provide insight into modern Japan. Edward B. Fowler, who teaches east Asian languages and literature at UCI, is scheduled to speak.