Nothing is more precious than freedom.
Yesterday I went to see the NYC premiere of Journey from the Fall with one of my surrogate-mothers on campus and other members of the Vietnamese Students Association, and after the film ended I knew that the long list of film festival awards was well justified. The film tells the story of one family’s journey from the fall of Saigon in 1975. When we were in the ImaginAsian cinema I was looking at the table of posters outside the theatre when I noticed several boxes of tissues available – It’s not possible to watch the film without crying a river. Perhaps seeing it was therapeutic for me since I’ve been holding back tears for a while now. Here are some thoughts on the film.
At first I was puzzled by the complex storytelling technique the filmmaker employed, but then it all made sense. Journey from the Fall has a non-linear narrative that jumps between from the protagonist’s suffering in the Communist “re-education” camps and the escape of his family to the “new economic zone” (i.e. America), yet also jumps forward and back chronologically. The narrative is united by the extended metaphor of the legend of Le Loi, reinterpreted in the film to parallel the protagonist’s sacrifice to allow his family to escape their past. The legend is told to the audience through a grandmother’s story and children’s drawings while the soft chords of a solo acoustic guitar express the sometimes overwhelming sorrow the film seeks to evoke.
The protagonist was an officer in the nationalist army that stayed behind after the fall of Saigon to resist the Communists, and was captured and taken to a “re-education” camp in the jungle, full of back-breaking construction and agriculture labor and land mines. I was amused to see the red banner above the entrance to the camp read “nothing is more precious than freedom” (of the ancients and the moderns, perhaps?), while a statue of the great leader stands silent while an absurd-looking party official delivers a sermon and the camp commissar smokes his bourgeois pipe. And then we segue to the incredible journey of his family with the boat people to Orange County, California, and the new life they find there.
After the film we had a little discussion about it outside the theatre. What struck me was how much their personal experiences verified the story. One of the VSA girls said that her older brother was actually born on the boat they escaped on, so they knew exactly when their family had fled the country. We compared the film with the previous Vietnamese film we saw (on campus), the Story of Pao, about a Hmong tribe girl’s search for her mother – none of them thought very much of that one. We wondered about reason for the difference, because both are ‘authentic’ yet one is far more real. Perhaps the answer is that the Vietnamese government supported the Story of Pao, while Journey from the Fall was (obviously) funded entirely privately from the Vietnamese diaspora community. Films like these speak so strongly against the enemies of freedom, far more eloquently and effectively than the pro-liberty documentaries of the Moving Picture Institute. I wonder if the libertarian movement really understands how to fight the culture war, when the best movies in the cause are not reactionary responses to the Michael Moore-style pseudo-documentaries of the radical left, but universal and timeless appeals to freedom and liberty. This had that universality and timelessness, yet was so much more powerful because it was closer to our world: events that take place only thirty years ago, with friends that still remember.
We were a relatively large group, and I suppose all Asian people look alike in the eyes of the locals. After dinner, an old white woman came up and pointedly asked us, “Are you all from the same country?” as if to imply something. I walked away though I wanted to say yes, we are. And that country is America.
Update: Vote for the film!
