Vietnamerica

Gr 9 Up—It's estimated that the United States accepted more than 500,000 Vietnamese refugees in the years following the Vietnam War. Hundreds of thousands of others lost their lives before they could escape or while attempting to cross the ocean. Filmmaker Scott Edwards explores the Vietnamese refugee experience and gives an overview of the politics of the war and events that led to the mass exodus after the fall of Saigon. One refugee, Master Nguyen Tien Hoá, has rebuilt his life in Texas, and Hoá returned to Indonesian and Malayan shores, hoping to find and honor the graves of his wife and children. Dr. Robert Turner and Dr. Lewis Sorley, American experts with political and academic ties, contribute frequent insights, as do Thanh Tran (a political prisoner and former prime minister of South Vietnam), General Viet Luong (the first Vietnamese American general in the U.S. military), and the movie's executive producer, Nancy Bui, founder and president of the Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation. The documentary uses interviews, archival footage, photographs, and occasional computer graphics to give historical context to the war. Hoá describes almost unbearable violence done to his family, yet he makes an uplifting and ultimately optimistic narrator.