BY ALEX HO

In print | November 15, 2007

From “Deer Hunter” to “Apocalypse Now” to “Good Morning, Vietnam,” American cinema certainly doesn’t starve for depictions of the Vietnam War. Rarely, however, has film looked at the war through the eyes of the Vietnamese and even more rarely has film focused on what happened after the fall of Saigon.

This past Thursday, the Swarthmore Asian Organization invited director Ham Tran to Swarthmore to show and discuss his recent film “Journey from the Fall,” which finally brings to screen the tragedy that befell all too many Vietnamese families once the war ended. Far from being just a successful film, “Journey from the Fall” is also an important effort to expose a history all but neglected in the U.S. and deliberately repressed in Vietnam. Tran said, “I wanted to make the film, because…the rest of the world doesn’t really know about this, and all of Vietnam is not told this story.”

Although “Journey from the Fall” is a fictional film about a South Vietnamese military officer, Long, who is imprisoned in a reeducation camp while his family attempts to escape the country by boat, the family’s story is, according to Tran, the story of “seven out of 10 Vietnamese-Americans.”

After the communist forces took Saigon, several hundred thousand officials of the former Republic of Vietnam were sent to reeducation camps and would only be released once they were deemed fit for society. We see Long at several points through his six-year internment from when he is first captured and told, “You sided with the American imperialists, waged war against the revolutionaries. You’re a traitor to your country, to your own people,” to years later when he and his fellow prisoners are little more than skeletons wearing the remnants of sandbags, scavenging for crickets to eat and risking death to escape from the camp. The communist slogan “Nothing is more precious than freedom” ironically hangs above the camp, as the prisoners are forced to do hard labor and even to clear the surrounding minefields.

“Journey” also dramatizes the story of the “boat people,” the millions of Vietnamese who tried to flee from the country as stowaways in small brigs, most of whom were unsuccessful. We are taken through the hellish experience of Long’s grandmother, wife Mai and son Lai as they face suffocation in the boat’s hull, capture by Vietnamese coast guards and attack from Thai pirates.

These two stories are intercut in a fragmented blur with hardly a single scene logically progressing to the next. Tran explained his rationale for having the film proceed with little regard to chronology. “I’m here, but I still remember vividly being in the refugee camp when I was eight,” Tran said. “We live multiple lives, multiple timelines.” Tran added that the film’s convoluted structure was meant to “emphasize the idea of displacement…a lot of people, when they were in prison, they had no idea what happened to their family…It’s chaos.” Through the course of film, Long and his family hear so many speculations about each other’s fate that nothing is certain, and the importance of hope gains prominence in their lives. The film largely utilizes a myopic depth of field which impresses the lack of comfort and stability of its displaced characters.

The second half of the film abruptly shifts to Orange County, California, but is hardly a reprieve from the film’s previous horrors. Even as Mai, Lai and his grandmother are out of reach of physical danger, the state of their family, nationality and very identity remain in ruins. Lai is a pariah at school, an environment wholly alien from the comforts of his home. He is soon suspended, and the school principal tells him, “I don’t get you kids. You’re all immigrants. You leave your home country because of war, and then you come here and you start to pick fights,” a scene that Tran says was drawn from firsthand experience. Meanwhile, Mai finds herself so emotionally drained and devoid of hope that she becomes absent as a mother to Lai. Here, it is clear that Tran’s attention is equally on how Vietnamese-Americans have been affected emotionally and psychologically by these geopolitical forces beyond their control. Among other things, the film becomes an infuriating defense of American immigrants. Intercultural Center intern Andrea Pien ‘08, commenting on the film’s complex transnational origins, said, “SAO being affiliated with [this event] is being supportive of different parts of the Asian community … This movie transcends—it’s international and American. So it redefines what Vietnamese is … it speaks to a broader base.”

Though “Journey” has received near unanimous praise, its few detractors have claimed that Tran sensationalizes what happened to the “boat people” and the victims of the reeducation camps with his slick film school aesthetic and perhaps at times too-Western musical score. But Tran’s unflinching and unsentimental epilogue, a far cry from a happy ending, suggests that Tran’s true intent is not to promote any particular ideology but to give face to his characters and their experiences. If anything, “Journey from the Fall” benefits heavily from the authenticity and personal investment that its mostly Vietnamese-American cast and crew bring. Tram said, “this is pretty much beat-by-beat the story of my executive producer…We had 12 investors total for this film, half of whom…were boat people or sons or daughters of reeducation camp prisoners.” Tran also cast almost all non-actors, many of whom had experiences similar to their characters. In his role as a communist official, one man recited the same speech he had heard regularly during his three years in a reeducation camp. Tran said, “For them, I think it was cathartic.”

“Journey” is officially banned in Vietnam, but pirated versions of the film have made their way into the country. Tran received an e-mail from students at the University of Ho Chi Minh City, who had seen the film. According to Tran, the students thanked him for making the film, saying, “We didn’t know about the re-education camps. We were taught that boat people were traitors to the country. We always thought that they were just leaving, that they were thought of taking the easy way out.”

That is the kind of change that Tran hopes to produce by distributing his film. “It’s been so repressed in our culture and in the Vietnamese-American community,” Tran said. “One thing that I’ve discovered is that people haven’t said anything about it, but they want to talk. They just need a context.”

« RETURN TO LIVING & ARTS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »