"The category of the Vietnam War film can also include representations of Southeast Asia during French colonialism, the brief decades of independence before the entrance of US troops, and the long legacy of the war in terms of refugee crisis, political unrest, genocide, PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), and protest."
The Vietnam War Legacies series presents documentary and experimental films from Southeast Asia, the United States, and the Southeast Asian diaspora.
Refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos share their stories in Brian Redondo's short film about Southeast Asian refugees facing deportation, Va-Megn Thoj's experimental video connecting his life in America and his birth in a secret CIA military base in the hills of Laos, and Christine Choy and JT Takagi's television documentary about refugees affected by racial tensions in California and Pennsylvania.
Vietnamese Diaspora stories include Adele Pham's documentaries on how the Vietnamese community grew the nail salon industry in the United States, Idrissou Mora-Kpai's documentary on the role of French colonialism in Vietnam and Benin, and experimental artist Tran T. Kim-Trang's meditation on motherhood and mourning.
Lastly, even our organization, Third World Newsreel or Newsreel, traces its origins to the late 60s Anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States. Founded by a collective of filmmakers in the winter of 1967, Newsreel produced independent documentary films about community groups vilified by mainstream media like Vietnam Veterans Against the War (AMERICA) and offered a realistic portrait of the American activists who organized to end the war (SUMMER 68). Members of the Newsreel collective traveled to Vietnam to record the devastation caused by the war (PEOPLE'S WAR) and to bring films that presented the conflict from a Vietnamese perspective (YOUNG PUPPETEERS OF VIETNAM).
"Brian Redondo's KEEP SARAY HOME bursts the bubble that separates Boston from Louisville, the Mexican border, Portland, the Californian forests, and the unrest that inhabits this nation."
"It's a quintessentially American story of rebuilding and making something new."
"INDOCHINA: TRACES OF A MOTHER gives space for the grown Afro-Vietnamese orphans to tell their stories, but also to explore the contradictions of the colonial order."
"Kim Trang-Tran's EPILOGUE is a touching examination of a mother-daughter relationship by way of Derrida and medical images."
The Imagined, the Longed-for, the Conquered and the Sublime (1994)
Bittersweet Survival: Southeast Asian Refugees in America (1982)
Boston Draft Resistance Group (Newsreel #7) (1968)
Catonsville Nine (Newsreel #18) (1968)
Resist - with Noam Chomsky (1968)
Jeannette Rankin Brigade (Newsreel #4) (1968)