I'm known in my Digital Histories Video class for submitting late films, past the deadline. Well this year I exceeded all expectations. I started late (one month ago) and finished late (one week before showing).
Timing was impeccable, as I was getting desperate, the US pulled out of Afghanistan and the news was plastered with pictures that reminded a lot of us of age of the fall of Vietnam. The classic photo is the helicopter on top of a building with people lined up to escape. The picture that kicked it all off:
I have a co worker that escaped from Vietnam. I should qualify that. Over the years I have worked with a lot of American Vietnamese of an older age, and each one of them had a story of escape and acculturating to American society. Tu's story hit me when I saw the picture. When I called him, he had been thinking of how to express those haunting photos and the associated personal memories. He jumped at the opportunity to tell his story.
2.5 hrs. later, I think both of us were emotionally exhausted. Listening to details of his life in Vietnam, his escape, his family both here and in Vietnam. The film does not do it justice of how many times he and his brothers barely escaped death.
So how do you trim down 2.5 hours of gut wrenching experiences that I will never comprehend into 9 minutes. It got to the point where I hated the film. I hated searching through hundreds of photos of the Vietnam war. I hated filtering out the death, desperation, and horror of war. I have a hard time reconciling the Vietnamese experience and the US Vietnam war veterans experience. I have a hard time comprehending it all. How do we as God' (spoiled) children comprehend mankind's' inhumanity to each other. It never seems to end.
