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Daughter From Danang was conceived on the fly, with
documentarians Vicente Franco and Gail Dolgin
meeting their subject, one Heidi Bub, for the first
time on the day before she left for Vietnam. As a seven-year-old
half-Vietnamese, half-American child, Heidi (originally Mai
Thi Hiep) was airlifted out of Vietnam in 1975 as part
of Operation Babylift and made adoptively American. Some 22
years later, having regained contact with her birth mother,
she returned for an emotional, exhaustingly videotaped reunion.
Bub is more American than even she suspects when noting that
she’s “101% Americanized.” She travels from a culture which
values “catharsis” and “closure” as things which emerge readily
and easily, and to which all humans have a right. Bub’s understanding
of where she’s about to go is radically, woefully inadequate.
Her relatives want money to care for Bub’s aged mother; Bub
feels taken advantage of and departs Vietnam in tears, presumably
never to return or re-establish contact with her relatives.
Bub embarks on the trip with a set of pre-defined objectives,
and is rabidly overarticulate in pre-trip interview. Her life
has been firmly established as a narrative in her mind, and
she delivers tired familial anecdotes with all the well-timed
pauses and overemphatic accents of someone who’s come to view
her life entirely in well-defined retrospect (displayed in
an online recount
of events, which fills in many of the unfortunate blanks in
the film regarding Bub‘s adopted mother). She states her desire
for unconditional love and closure; her goals are entirely
American-defined. Yet rather than question her expectations,
the filmmakers play along, providing that staple of incompetent
documentaries, blurry after-the-fact slow-motion footage designed
to represent childhood flashbacks. They seem to think that
Bub’s goals are entirely reasonable, and only fail due to
cultural conflict. They miss Bub’s selfishness, which basically
comes down to an amateur psychology workout wherein a childhood
with a faulty maternal presence will suddenly be compensated
for, catharsis achieved, etc. Never once do the filmmakers
question Bub’s set-in-stone story, with its carefully defined
emotional arc. Oddly enough, only toward the end of the film
does someone actually do this: Bub’s military husband, who
stayed at home while she went to Vietnam, recounts how, whenever
he’d ask her about her trip, Bub would give incredibly vague,
emotional answers and then “expect me to understand.” It is
the only voice of doubt heard regarding how praiseworthy or
intelligent Bub’s intentions were in the first place.
As a documentary, Daughter From Danang will never
be confused with the work of the Maysles brothers or,
more closely, Sound And Fury, an extraordinary documentary
which also dealt with cultural and familial conflict. The
differences are obvious: Those movies don’t have heroes, just
various well-intentioned protagonists, all of whom end up
losing. But Daughter From Danang pits America against
Vietnam and spends the majority of its time empathizing with
the pain of the former, reducing Vietnam to a series of picturesque
shots emphasizing poverty. Ultimately though, there’s little
to sympathize with: Heidi Bub comes across as a well-intentioned
but fairly ignorant, entirely self-absorbed woman, the kind
of person whose geopolitical ignorance would drive Jonathan
Rosenbaum into a frenzy and, more importantly, is deeply
unnerving in anybody who ostensibly wants to reconnect in
any meaningful way with their past.
For all its flaws (its unquestioning acceptance of Bub, the
hackneyed flashbacks, the sentimental music—all things which
take their cue from “Oprah”), Daughter From Danang
is a mostly riveting and painful experience which serves as
a sobering reminder of how American ignorance and complacency
can only survive within its borders. Edited down to its bare
essence, Daughter From Danang minimalizes travelogue
footage and emphasizes the relevant, painful conflicts. It
can be excruciating to watch, but there’s barely any fat;
it’s like some sort of streamlined case study. There’s a fine
film waiting to be made about Operation Babylift’s political
significance, hinted at in some stock footage used early on,
but this is strictly a personal affair. As Bub herself writes:
“I will give this one advise [sic] to anyone who is looking
for their birth family... make sure it is absolutely, without
a doubt what you want.” No gratification? Then no reward,
not even that of knowledge. Bub is truly an American from
first to last.
—Vadim Rizov
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out of 5
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