The film traces the story of a family's struggle for survival in the aftermath of the Fall of Sài Gòn on April 30, 1975 to North Vietnam's communist regime.
The New York Times remarked that the director "achieves the impossible" and called it a "tearjerker".
The Los Angeles Times called it a "superbly wrought saga of loss and survival" and "an example of sophisticated, impassioned filmmaking involving mainly people who lived through the harrowing experiences so unsparingly depicted".