WRITER-director Ham Tran likes to whisper. He often does it as he directs his actors, looking them in the eyes.
"Their eyes will tell you if they're in the moment or not," Tran said, adding that entering the difficult moments he wanted to create is "not about tears. It's about drifting into a place of memory." Such drifting was an important process for Tran's first feature, "Journey From the Fall," which opened Friday in limited release in New York, San Jose, Westminster and Garden Grove. The film follows the Vietnamese refugee experience after the 1975 fall of Saigon, tracing the story of a family that must flee to America by boat when a father is detained in a "reeducation" camp.
Around the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, Tran became obsessed with little-known stories of the estimated 2 million boat people who fled the Communists. He would eventually interview more than 400 people, including refugees and survivors of the reeducation camps, which were essentially prisons.
With Thailand substituting for Vietnam (the government still disavows the camps and wouldn't permit filming), Tran cast many of his interviewees, asking them to relive their memories, which he regards as the smartest decision he made. Though they weren't actors, with the help of Tran's whisperings they provided a palpable realism to the film.
For instance, Tran elicited a tearful performance from one survivor who'd lost contact with his daughter. "I said, 'For the next five minutes I want you to look at this photograph. Picture your missing daughter. What would you say to her?' " Tran said. "And naturally from there he went straight into the dialogue."
"For those people, they don't have to act," said Kieu Chinh ("The Joy Luck Club"), one of few professional actors on set. "They cry real tears, not make-up tears."
In another scene, Tran took his cast to the middle of the ocean to catch a rainstorm (rain machines were not included in the film's $1.6-million budget). When Tran ordered actors to hide from the rain, one survivor in the cast corrected him.
"[This woman said], 'When the storm came, we jumped out of the hull. We grabbed all the bowls we could find. We soaked it up into our clothes and wrung out our clothes later to drink the water, because we were that thirsty,' " Tran said.
