War trauma marks the hearts and minds of even those born after the war, especially if that war was Vietnam. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and many of the films in the Vietnamese International Film Festival that takes place this weekend and next are infused with a sense of wistfulness and of melancholy. They evoke an idyllic homeland, they mourn its loss, they commemorate a painful transition to a new home. What is surprising is how young the filmmakers are -- many are under 30 and were born outside Vietnam. They seem to have internalized their parents' memories of their native land, as well as their trauma of war and escape.
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Echoes of war, 30 years later
Loss and salvation loom large at the Vietnamese International Film Festival, even for those who live outside their ancestral home.
"My heart beats in a different rhythm," says the narrator in Simon Cuong Phan's meditative short "Mother Vietnam." A kind of tone-poem, the film blends dance, song, documentary footage, personal narrative and text from Buddhist sutra. Having found a good life in America, the filmmaker still aches with homesickness. "My eyes search where the sun sets, beyond the deep restless water. I strain to hear the soft, comforting lullaby from that faraway land."
Continuing through Sunday this weekend and concluding April 14 through 17, the festival has been jointly organized by Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Assn. (VAALA) and Vietnamese Language & Culture. It includes six features, at least half of which ("Buffalo Boy," "Spirits" and "Journey From the Fall") have secured theatrical distributors, and 31 shorts. Screenings take place mostly on the campus of UC Irvine, with one day (today) scheduled at UCLA. Among the highlights are a panel discussion with noted film scholar Trinh T. Minh-ha on Thursday, a symposium on "Cultural Identity in the Arts" on April 16, and a closing program featuring Nghiem-Minh Nguyen-Vo's award-winning "Buffalo Boy" on April 17.
"Cinema is still a new art in our community," says festival co-director Ysa Le, "and we think it needs to be promoted." As a member of VAALA, she recalls that in 2002 they organized a symposium with a panel of Vietnamese directors and actors, which led to the idea of the festival. The first was in 2003, and in light of the still-small stream of films available, they decided to make it a biennial event.
Many of the films do have Vietnamese actors and themes, but Duc Nguyen's "Mediated Reality" is a documentary on Cuba and Thanh Nguyen's "Something Fishy" is an animated fable featuring a beefy white angler.
"The filmmakers are mostly in their 20s," says Le. "The youngest is still in high school." That's Andy Nguyen who made the short "A Silent Night." Several are film school students or recent graduates -- Kim Spurlock ("Buoi Chieu") is in New York University's graduate film program, Victor Vu ("Spirits") attended Loyola Marymount University, and Ham Tran ("Journey From the Fall") attended UCLA.
The fest is showing a trailer for Tran's feature film, "Journey From the Fall," an epic about the struggles of a Vietnamese family during the fall of Saigon and their eventual escape to the United States. It is slated for release this month.
Two of the feature films are by older filmmakers, "Deserted Valley" by Pham Nhue Giang and Nguyen-Vo's "Buffalo Boy." Both were shot in Vietnam. "Deserted Valley" tells of two teachers and a principal valiantly trying to make a go of a public school among a tribe of Vietnamese highlanders, whose priorities tend to be farming and early marriage. This is the single feature in the festival actually from Vietnam.
"Buffalo Boy" director Nguyen-Vo grew up in Vietnam but went to France to study engineering, before coming to UCLA to study physics. In a way, he grew up in the movie business -- his family owned the only theater in the war-torn coastal village of Vung Tau. "I would sneak in when there was no fighting going on," he says. "It was my escape from the atrocity of the world outside. I just watched people falling in love in 18th century France."
Ten years ago he began taking filmmaking courses at UCLA Extension. When he decided to make a feature, he recalled a collection of short stories by the celebrated writer Son Nam. Two stories stuck in his mind -- one about a young man who goes off to herd buffalo and comes back swearing, the other about the difficulties of burial during the wet season -- and he melded them into a screenplay.
In 2000 this screenplay attracted the attention of France's Equinoxe Assn., which invited him to a workshop in France. There he met Belgian producer Olivier Dubois. They eventually found co-funding from a French producer and the Vietnamese government.
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