From Hollywood to Hanoi

I find this to be a very interesting film, first because of my time in Viet Nam and second because it explores the thoughts and feelings of a young woman from Viet Nam who returns to find her roots. The film is a record of her visit, post war, over the objection of her father. She makes contact with the family left behind and takes a no holds barred look at conditions of the country she left as a child. A wonderful expose of what it means to be a refugee and to return to the home of one's birth even though the native country and the adopted country are at odds. This film transcends politics but doesn't shy from them as it looks at culture of those left behind and those who have moved on to a new life. I think that everyone should view this film and get a feel of what it means to have been a child of a long, controversial war.

A revealing, sometimes disturbing, heartfelt glimpse at early '90s Vietnam, from the viewpoint of a most interesting individual—a personality whose rich and fascinating path back to her native homeland, nearly threatens to outshine the narrative detailing the tremendously dramatic, cultural and political landscape of the war-torn country.

Interviews with family living in both America and Asia, politicians and military leaders from each country, and biracial offspring produced by the war (either transplanted to the US, or abandoned by GIs in Vietnam), provide poignant insight and perspective from both sides.

Equally impressive is the surprisingly neutral tone presented by the director (considering obvious personal connections)—diplomatically, and yet somehow inherently subversively allowing viewpoints to air with a viscerally provocative, journalistic lack of judgment, that empowers the audience to form their own opinions.

Coming to "From Hollywood to Hanoi" after so much history has been added to the stories of the United States and Vietnam since the end of the war between them, one is struck both by how prescient the film was on its 1992 release as well as how optimistic its filmmaker, Tiana Thi Thanh Nga, was when she made it. On one level, the documentary about a Vietnamese-American woman trying to untangle the twisted strands of her bi-national life is a universal quest for self and homeland. On the other, it's an absolution of America spoken without rancor by the people who were attacked by the greatest military force on earth. One expects that any film about Vietnam -- and certainly one that features Vietnamese people remembering the war -- would automatically be an indictment of the people who waged it (Gen. William Westmoreland, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, Secretary of State Robert McNamara and the special interests whose water they carried). But that doesn't happen. Instead, Tiana -- whose father was press liaison for South Vietnam and remained a staunch Conservative until his death -- draws compassionate, even hopeful statements from the people that the bombs fell on. She is a winning screen interlocutor, a knowledgeable guide, and a dynamic Everywoman who unites rather than divides. I saw the film when it was originally released and found it a compelling character study. Seeing it again after some twenty years -- and after the death of General Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of North Vietnam's defense strategy -- I am struck by how much has changed and, with regret, how much has not. The tiny nation that America could not conquer by force has instead being conquered by business. It's the people on both sides want to make peace; their governments still haven't come fully around. Maybe they should all see the remarkable "From Hollywood to Hanoi" again.

For those of us who dread another terse journalistic foray into Vietnam's war-torn heart of darkness, relax! From Hollywood To Hanoi takes us on a positive journey that is both refreshing and revealing.

The filmmaker, Tiana Alexandra, left her homeland as a youngster after her father, the Minister of Media for President Diem's southern regime, lost confidence in his government. The family resettled in Virginia – far from Saigon's bomb-rattled windows and burning monks. But America's Utopian promise did not settle Tiana's restless soul.

Despite her blossoming success as an actress in Hollywood, and her father's admonitions not to return to the communist stronghold, Tiana ventured back to her forbidden homeland. Her unswerving curiosity leads us on a journey deep into the heart and soul of Vietnam: a land whose people were battered by history, yet never lost the intrinsic core of their forgiving culture.

At the end of her odyssey, Tiana uses the weapons of love and poetry to open the doors and hearts of her father's dreaded northern enemies. The hydra-headed communist monster purrs like a kitten in Tiana's hands, putting us in touch with the softer side of feared leaders like Pham Van Dong, Le Duc Tho, and Ho Chi Minh's military mastermind, General Vo Nguyen Giap. We can all learn from their sincere messages of peace, tolerance and reconciliation.

Tiana Alexandra Silliphant's momentous documentary, about her return to her Vietnamese homeland, was theatrically released in 1995 and subsequently broadcast on Cinemax.

FROM Hollywood TO HANOI depicts Tiana's journey to Vietnam in 1988, and was the first American film shot in Vietnam after the war. Tiana was born after the French were driven out of Vietnam in 1954 following their loss at Dien Bien Phu. She left the country with her family in 1966, following the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem - just as the next foreign occupier – America – was ramping up its own war efforts.

I have a particular interest in this remarkable journey because I was a senior in college when the draft lottery was reinstated on Dec. 1, 1969 (at the height of the war), making my graduating college class of 1970 the first to graduate with a diploma and a draft number. But this is a story that will capture the hearts and minds of anyone of any age who has an interest in learning from history why our country's seemingly endless contemporary war footing is a function as much of amnesia, as it is a vestigial need to remain the world's policeman.

Tiana grew up in Fairfax, Virginia, where her family resettled. Her father had been a politician, then Director of Press Relations for Diem. His anger at the communists who overran his country and his ongoing resentment of their victory is one of the emotional dynamics in Tiana's decision to return to Vietnam to see firsthand how the country coped after so many years of war.

An actress who starred alongside Robert Duvall, James Caan and Rod Steiger (among others), and trained with Bruce Lee, Tiana makes a formidable guide for this journey. Equal parts self-reliant, unabashed, brazen, heartfelt and curious, she exposes the viewer to peasants and politicians alike – with a couple of seminal military figures also included: General Giap, who helped defeat both the French and the Americans, and General Westmoreland. (Tiana was the first western journalist to interview Giap).

Tiana's journey takes her from Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) to Hanoi. Her quest is twofold: to come to terms with her own ambiguity about being so intimately connected to both cultures... and to take the temperature of a country that was strafed, bombed, burned and napalmed by the country of which she was now a citizen. It was a twin-healing she sought.

She returns to America personally rejuvenated - hopeful that her own emotional healing might augur well for a similar reconciliation between countries so famously linked by war. In the years since she made this film, the passage of time has seen the current administration shift its focus from Europe to Asia... signifying, perhaps, a national journey that might eventually share a similar reconciliation. Now if we could only get out of Afghanistan, and stay out of Syria, Libya and Iran, we might be able to say we finally learned something from the war in Southeast Asia made us losers for the first time.

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A couple of sidebars:

Most of the Vietnamese interviewed by Tiana showed no residual animosity for the people of the United States – but with the government that sent its soldiers into a war (of John Foster Dulles's "communist containment"). The lingering after-effects of the war are visible in the faces of the "Amerasian" Vietnamese, whose American fathers abandoned them when the war ended (and left many to a lifetime of scorn)... and in the disfigured survivors and fetuses of the those whose DNA was altered by the Americans' wartime policy of defoliating the countryside with Agent Orange.

Tiana's own parents remained unwilling to return to Vietnam while the communists were in control (and have since passed away.) Their emotional reaction to video messages from family members who stayed behind underscores the wrenching and often unseen emotional damage of war. Their hardened feelings are reminiscent of the thousands of Cubans who fled to Florida when Castro took power, unwilling to return home in his lifetime.

The film was executive produced by filmmaker Oliver Stone who knows a thing or two about Vietnamese and American relations (Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July). Most heartening – for anyone who is sure to be captivated by this colorful and compelling journey – Tiana's relationship with the legendary General Giap marked the beginning of a twenty-five year friendship that led to hours of filmed interviews that is being shaped into her next project: THE GENERAL & ME.

• Denis O'Neill