An amazing documentary film following the lives of orphans airlifted out of Vietnam in the waning days of the war will have its World Premiere at ViFF tonight, 7:30pm, at the Bowers Museum.
Following the showing will be a panel discussion with the director and a number of former orphans.
The film Operation Babylift: The Lost Children of Vietnam is the brain child of Texas-based Tammy Nguyen Lee and features many compelling interviews with not just former adoptees and their families, but also American volunteers who had worked in orphanages in Saigon during the war and who were involved in the airlift.
Operation Babylift was an initiative approved by President Gerald Ford to retrieve 2,500 Vietnamese orphans during the last days of the war and bring them to safety in the U.S. Even with the best of intentions, however, the orphans, all of whom found adopting families, grew up facing unique challenges.
The movie follows a number of these former orphans who are now grown men and women in their thirties, and explore their issues including prejudice and identity crisis.
The director Tammy Nguyen Lee (pictured right) is a graduate of SMU’s Meadows School with a B.A. with honors in Cinema, and also a Bruin, having graduated from UCLA’s Producers Program with an MFA. She is also, get this, a former Miss Asian American Texas 1999-2000.
Also playing today at the Bowers are two short programs. The first starts at 11 and features, among others, a 10-minute presentation of YouTube phenomena Unco Same, Unco Chin by their cinematographer Danny Do; a 19-minute short from 1968 called Délire by French-Vietnamese filmmaker Nguyen Dinh Nhan; and a 6-minute animation by Hanoi-based Ta Thanh Hai telling the Vietnamese fable Cuội and the Banyan Tree.
A second set of shorts starts at 4pm consists of four longer pieces, among which is Emiko Omori‘s 7,500 Miles to Redemption (pictured below), a powerful documentary about a convict in a maximum security prison, Tinh Mahoney, who shares with his fellow inmates the dream of building schools in the village of his birth near Phan Thiet, Vietnam.
See the complete ViFF schedule here.
