by Minh T. Nguyen
Author's note: I did this interview on January 12th, 2005 for UVSA's Non Song magazine. Due to page-limitations, the transcript below covers only a small part of the full 25-minute interview, but I posted the complete audio interview here. For the Vietnamese translation of this article, pick up the Tet 2005 Non Song issue at the Tet Festival in Little Saigon or visit the Non Song page when the issue is available in a few weeks online.
Ham Tran is UCLA graduate in Fine Arts and became best known with his thesis film The Anniversary that won him the prestigious USA Film Festival Award, which also qualified the film for the 2004 Academy Awards for Best Live Action Short. Ham Tran recently finished the much-anticipated boat people-movie Journey from the Fall which is often referred to as the Schindler’s List for the Vietnamese Diaspora. Ham Tran recently presented excerpts from the movie at the Fourth International Vietnamese Youth Conference in Sydney, Australia, after which Non Song had a chance to interview him about his first feature-length movie.
Q: Can you summarize the movie and tell us what “Journey from the Fall” is about?
A: It’s the untold story about the post-Vietnam war experience of re-education camps, boat people and the immigration process to America. It’s about a family that separated after the war and struggling against all odds to be reunited in the hope of freedom.
Q: Why did you decided to do this movie?
A: I was writing my short The Anniversary which was about the Vietnam War, but taking it from a Vietnamese perspective and telling the story of the Vietnam War as a civil war, rather than a war between America vs. Vietnam. As I was researching about the history of the Vietnam war, I came to realize that no film has ever been made that talked about the Vietnamese boat people experience, and as I was researching, I was finding a lot of stories about re-education camps and realized that in the last thirty years no film whatsoever—American, Vietnamese, Chinese or whatever—has been made about it. As I finished The Anniversary in 2003, I realized that we are coming up towards the 30-year anniversary [of the fall of Saigon] and that something needs to be said about that and that it needs to be told in a Vietnamese voice.
Q: What kind of research did you do for the movie or did you have any personal experience to draw upon?
A: My aunt who sponsored us to America was a boat person. She left on this boat and then had chicken pox, so they were about to throw her over because they were afraid that chicken pox might spread and get everybody on board sick, so they were going to throw her over the next morning. Then, in the middle of the night, they were hit by pirates and because she had chicken pox, the pirates didn’t want to go near her, and so the next morning they were rescued. These unbelievable stories about human endurance and suffering are all within our community. I started finding out, for instance, that my father’s friend, who was a very high-ranking officer, was in prison for twenty years, and he is the person who sort of kept my dad away from the frontlines, because he knew my dad had a family. So, he did my dad a favor, but after the war, he was arrested and got in prison.
When I started working on The Anniversary my producer Lam told me that his father was killed in an education camp. He was killed without trial, his body was buried and to this day his family doesn’t know where the father’s body is. Lam’s mom knew a lot of Vietnamese veterans who were in prison, so we started interviewing them and finding out more stories.
Q: How long did the entire production take?
A: The production itself took about just a year, but the writing part took three years. I started writing it around 2001, and then refined it and we then had it ready in 2004 and were looking for funding to make the film. At that time, The Anniversary was shortlisted for the Academy Awards, and so we got a lot of attention from the studios and I met with them.
Q: What was the hardest part in the entire production?
A: Strangely enough, the biggest hurdle right now is selling the film—it’s getting the film out there. I am learning now that so many films get made a year, but only about less than 10% of it ever go to the theaters. When we shot the film, we went through floods, storms and all kinds of crazy things, but all that had an ultimate goal, which is to finish the film. It was very immediate, and we knew what we had to do the next day, and we knew what to do to get it accomplished. The resources were within our control at least. Selling the film and getting the film out there—I have no control over that.
Q: That leads us to the question that so many people have been asking you. You have kind of finished the movie last year and had screenings in selected cities. What does it take for the movie to finally get out to national screens now?
A: When we screened it last April, it wasn’t 100% completed yet. We had a lot of sound and edit problems. If you saw it then and see it now—it’s a completely different film as well. We officially finished it in September/beginning October. Now the hurdle is to convince the buyers that there is a market for the film.
For us the goal right now is to see what happens at the Sundance Film Festival. Currently, buyers are interested, but they are waiting to see the outcome of Sundance. Our plan is that if no one is buying the film at Sundance, we are going to try and self-distribute the film for April 30th. It’s not like it has never been done before. Other films have been able to be successfully self-distributed. We will try and do it as well and hopefully Vietnamese people will come out and support it.
Q: I’ve been to the sold-out screening, and people loved it, and the community is asking for more. What can they do to help you to get the movie out?
A: That’s a question I am sort of examining myself. How the community can help is actually not necessarily towards this film, but making their consumer identity known. What do I mean by that? It means going out and supporting Vietnamese films whenever they get released. It’s almost as if it’s a social responsibility. If there is a Vietnamese film out there, we need to go to the movie theater, we buy the movie tickets and don’t wait for the DVDs to come out in order to go see the film. We generate the box office dollars for the film.
It happened that way for the black community with Spike Lee’s film, when he did Do the Right Thing. Because before then, there wasn’t that big of a black community that went up to pay dollars to see a black film, and I think what we need to do right now is to pay dollars to see a Vietnamese film. That’s the only way that we can get the industry and the studios to realize that ‘hey, you know what? There is a market out there!’
Q: With Journey from the Fall wrapping up and hopefully coming to the theaters some time this year, what do you hope the movie will accomplish? How do you measure success besides the number of ticket sales?
A: I think the ultimate goal is this. Of course, at least to make enough money to pay back the people that financed the film. Far from that, what’s more gratifying for me is the feeling that it opens up dialogue. Recently, I went up to Oakland to visit my grandfather and showed the film for him and my aunt, and they were all boat people. While the film was playing, they started talking. Most people would get annoyed, but then for me it was this incredible feeling of gratification, because they started talking about their boat escape. She is like ‘oh my God, this is what happened to us, and I had to do this and then I had to come back to get your grandfather and this and that.’ So, here I am, supposedly screening my film, but getting a lesson in my family history instead. I think the most important thing is to open up a dialogue, so that people begin to understand their own family histories.
One of our investors’ dad was in prison for ten years. So we sit down with him for two hours and interviewed him. He told us a lot of his stories about his education camp. My producer must have cried 400 times during the audition process, and at the end we asked how his family reacted to this, and he said that he has never told anyone these stories. So even my executive producers—he doesn’t even know his father’s story about what happened in re-education camp. It’s because of the need to silence up and protect the kids form the ugliness from the war. It’s a personal kind of shame having gone through that kind of experience. I think, if anything, we need to talk about them. We need to acknowledge what happened within our own families. In that way, we can move on.
I know that my father is still traumatized by the war. I know it in a way they fear the communist or are very suspicious of the communist, and they have a reason to be because they went through that first-hand. But we don’t know that, so we interpret their experience and their point of view as being paranoid and whatever, and we shut ourselves off to that. So I think as the 1.5 and 2.0 generation, we need to know these stories and know ourselves so that we can start the healing process for our parents.
Q: With Journey from the Fall wrapping up, what’s next for you? Any plans for your next movie?
A: I had a couple of thoughts, but because of Dai Hoi [the Fourth International Vietnamese Youth Conference], I got inspired and have another idea for another film. I am really inspired to tell the story of human trafficking. I think it’s a very important story. I don’t know if it’s going to be the next film, but I know it’s going to be one of the films that I want to do in my career. Before I went to Dai Hoi, I wanted to tell the story of the birth and the growth of Little Saigon based on my childhood experiences, like a Vietnamese gangster film set against the birth of Little Saigon.
Q: Okay, Ham. Thank you so much for the interview and good luck at Sundance.
A: Thank you.