Film Series Explores Vietnamese Experiences

Helicopters on a maroon sky and images of war-torn My Lai haunted Boylston Hall last Saturday.

At the first in a series of screenings sponsored by the Harvard Vietnamese Association (HVA), the Vietnam war combat cameraman turned documentary filmmaker Tran Van Thuy spoke to an enthusiastic audience of two hundred that packed Fong Auditorium.

Highly controversial for their depictions of post-war Vietnam under the Communist regime, Thuy’s films have been met with vehement responses at universities nationwide and at film festivals such as the Festival du Reel in Paris and the Leipzig International Film Festival.

Thuy, among the generation of East Asian filmmakers personally marked by violent political upheaval of the 60’s and 70’s, says he is deeply concerned about the ethical role played by both film and filmmaker.

“I always tell my film students…the most important thing is to know one’s duty as a citizen,” Thuy says.

“The duty of the citizen is that when we have an idea we have to follow it—we can’t just leave it,” Thuy says. “I try to be as truthful as possible in the films…it’s not an easy thing to do.”

“The Sound of the Violin in My Lai,” one of the three films shown at the screening, testifies to the horror of history. The film was made in 1998 on the 30 year anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, when U.S. soldiers annihilated the rural village of My Lai in South Vietnam, killing hundreds of civilians.

The film juxtaposes gory images of the war, including photographs by both American and Vietnamese photographers—with the green pastures of My Lai today. The narrator, Mike Boehm, is an American who participated in the Vietnam War and returns thirty years later.

The film also describes the story of two American soldiers, Hugh Thompson and Larry Colburn. Unlike the other soldiers, the two stopped their helicopter amid the massacre and rescued several civilians.

Ironically, most of the images Thuy used for “The Sound of the Violin in My Lai” are from American, and not

Vietnamese, sources. Along with limited access to historical images, Thuy’s films suffer from low budget and poor equipment, like many other films made in Vietnam.

Thuy says he experiences government censorship regularly as a result of his critique of the Communist Party. His first film was banned in Vietnam from 1982-87. His second film “The Story of Kindness,” which was shown Saturday, was also banned upon release.

Only after the intervention of Communist Party leader Nguyen Van Linh was it released for public screening in the 1990s.

When asked about the future of Vietnamese film, Thuy remarks that it is “cloudy.”

“Your freedom is how you perceive it,” Thuy says.

On the other hand, he says, “A lot of money and freedom do not necessarily mean you’ll make a good movie, if it doesn’t have that human quality.”

The human quality is precisely what interests Thuy; it finds full expression in “The Story of Kindness,” which begins with a quote from Karl Marx: “Only animals turn from human suffering.”

The camera moves from scenes of destitute farmers in rural Vietnam to a scene of a Catholic nun caring for a man afflicted with leprosy. Against soothing music and the serene voice of a male narrator commenting on themes of death, kindness and happiness, stand searing images of rural poverty and illness a decade after the war.

“What does it mean to care about people?” the film asks at one point.

In Vietnam, the term “people” has had many connotations, encompassing the masses and the peasantry that the Communist Party claims to represent.

“The people” also stands in contrast to the elite represented by intellectuals like Thuy, whose education took him to film school in Moscow in the 1970s.

Before the 1970s, when the Communist Party took over in Vietnam, people were allowed to make films depicting rural poverty, Thuy says. After Party control, however, such images were censored as negative testimony.

The moving, if simple message of “The Story of Kindness” is that in the face of suffering and atrocities, the lesson of history is to understand kindness and forgiveness.

A similar message underlies the two other films, “The Sound of the Violin in My Lai” and “The Story from the Corner of a Park,” which tells the story of a former Vietnamese soldier whose two children were disabled by the chemical effects of Agent Orange.

“What we do as filmmakers is not accuse or find fault,” says Thuy, “but to let the younger generation know that history should not repeat itself.”

“Kindness” is, of course, a highly complex issue. Vietnamese members of the audience expressed skepticism of Thuy’s work, saying that he is too forgiving of the Communist regime, especially in his depictions of the Vietnam war.

During the Tet Offensive in 1968, the Vietcong under Communist leadership had massacred thousands of civilians in the village of Hue; after the war, the regime imposed a series of land reforms that drove thousands of South Vietnamese families into “re-education camps.”

For some members of the audience, Thuy’s work, like most media that addresses the war, shifts the attention from Communist atrocities to American atrocities, and serves to draw sympathy not to the true victims of the war but to the Communist regime.

Other members of the audience appreciated Thuy’s efforts.

“I’ve read of Vietnamese filmmakers and artists having to be innovative in their tactics. Tran Van Thuy is a model,” says audience member Richard Streitmatter-Tran.

“[The film experience] was incredibly powerful,” says Anne Nguyen ’04. “It moved me on so many levels, especially when the issues are so personal and so close to home.”

According to Mai Anh Huynh ’04, president of the Harvard Vietnamese Association, the series of screenings is the first of its kind sponsored by the HVA.

Funded by the Harvard Foundation and the Harvard International Relations Council, future screenings include “King of the Garbage Dumps” this upcoming Saturday with director Do Minh Tuan, and a third screening on March 14, with guest T. T. Nhu, of 2002 Sundance winner “Daughter from Da Nang.”