The stories of the Vietnamese “boat people” have not been dramatized onscreen enough. Since Ann Hui’s 1982 film “Boat People,” the subject of the refugees from the aftermath of the Vietnam War has been mostly relegated to TV documentaries.
That oversight is rectified with “Journey from the Fall,” a powerful film created by Vietnamese-Americans, many of them former boat people or children of escapees.
It would have been easy to make this into a routine, movie-of-the-week style tearjerker, but “Journey” takes a tougher route. For starters, the story comes in pieces, jumping back and forth through different time periods.
A glimpse of the fall of Saigon in 1975 gives us the basics of the situation: As the Communists overwhelm the city, a South Vietnamese activist (Long Nguyen) chooses to stay behind. However, he insists his wife (Vietnamese-American singer Diem Lien) and son (Nguyen Thai Nguyen) escape the country, along with his indomitable mother (Kieu Chinh).
That’s how the story splits apart. At times we watch as the family makes its horrifying voyage on a cramped fishing boat across the ocean; other times we return to the man’s brutal treatment in prison camps and “re-education” centers.
Writer-director Ham Tran does not stint on the gut-wrenching details of this parallel journey. It all feels eerily authentic, right down to the kind of graveyard humor that prisoners share while caged in a sweatbox.
The film’s interesting structure takes another shift at the two-thirds point, changing its focus to Southern California and the re-adjustment of immigrants to a new country. How the horrors of the past remain in the present is very much the subject of this section.
The film is superbly photographed, with the Vietnam scenes shot in Thailand. The actors are uniformly fine, with special honors to Long Nguyen as the determined prisoner. Also good are Khanh Doan, as the boat captain who bestows a quiet humanity on his charges, and Jayvee Mai The Hiep, as an unexpectedly droll cellmate.
This film is a valuable reminder of where the current state of Vietnam came from. It’s also a reminder that every American “Little Saigon” community has a long story behind it.
A scene from “Journey from the Fall.”
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