Portraying the Vietnamese immigrant experience through Kieu, A Tale of Love follows the quest of a woman in love with Love. Voyeurism runs through the history of narrative and is here one of the threads that structure the film. Playing with the fiction of love in love stories, the film invites a different experience of cinema with non-naturalistic acting and layered interaction of performed reality, memory and imagination.

Le Ly lives in a small Vietnamese village whose serenity is shattered when war breaks out. Caught between the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese army, the village is all but destroyed. After being both brutalized and raped, Le Ly resolves to flee. She leaves for the city, surviving desperate situations, but surviving nonetheless. Eventually she meets a U.S. Marine named Steve Butler who treats her kindly and tells her he would like to be married -- maybe to her.