Daughter From Danang Reviews

The winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco's unusually rich film tells the story of one Vietnamese-born American woman who goes looking for her roots but gets a lot more than she bargained for. Mai Thi Hiep was one of thousands of South Vietnamese children airlifted out of South Vietnam in the spring of 1975 and adopted by U.S. families. "Operation Babylift" was essentially a last-ditch "humanitarian" effort by the U.S. government to win sympathy for an unpopular war, and was sold to frightened Vietnamese parents as the responsible thing to do. Hiep's mother, Mai Thi Kim, was understandably worried: Hiep's father, a U.S. serviceman, left Danang not long after the girl was born, and Kim had heard rumors that all Amerasian children were going to be rounded up. (Kim's husband, Do Huu Vinh, spent most of the war years fighting with the North Vietnamese army.) So with a heavy heart, Kim agreed to let 7-year-old Hiep be flown to the U.S., where she was adopted by a single mother and given an Americanized name. "Heidi" grew up a fairly typical American girl in Pulaski, Tenn., downplaying her Asian heritage but haunted by feelings of abandonment and fading memories of another mother on the other side of the world. As a married adult with two children of her own, Heidi was able to trace Kim's whereabouts and arranged a trip back to Vietnam, where mother and daughter would finally meet for the first time in 22 years. It's clear from the outset that Heidi is looking for a great deal more than her past: She arrives in Danang searching for the kind of warm, unconditional love that Heidi imagined mothers lavish on their children, but never received from the woman who adopted her. What Heidi didn't expect was that Kim and her large, impoverished family would expect something in return. The film starts out as a fairly standard look at the emotional fallout from Operation Babylift — families ripped apart in the name of rescuing "orphans" who were anything but — but once Kim and Heidi finally meet, it becomes something much more complex: a gripping drama of culture clash and familial responsibility that also serves as a stinging metaphor for U.S. involvement in Third World nations like Vietnam.