SDAFF Report: The Journey Begins on Opening Night

The gala opening night screener was similarly well traveled. Journey From The Fall has appeared at Sundance, Milan International Film Festival, and elsewhere before winding it's way here. Following the fall of Saigon, it unblinkingly conveys the plight of the "boat people" fleeing the country, and the political prisoners tortured in re-education camps. But despite the grim subject matter, the Von Trier-esque amounts of sadism dished out to its protagonists, it made for a good opening night film. Filling the UltraStar Mission Valley cineplex's massive 400-seat theater to capacity were not solely cineasthetes, but several elderly couples. During the Q&A following the screening, several of the cast and crew identified themselves as boat people. When the audience was asked, moments later, how many of them traveled out of Vietnam that way, a good two dozen or so hands flew up; about half that many viewers had survived a POW stint in a re-education camp.

Journey From The Fall is cathartic in its unrelenting tone. Yet unlike recent American psychic high-colonics like United 93, it isn't a rehash of a nationally fetishized tragedy, discussed and dissembled ad nauseam; indeed, director Ham Tran feels Vietnamese refugees have been too silent in speaking to their wounds. But if the boat peoples' plight was reminiscent of what's depicted in the film, it may be understandable. Beginning in 1975 with the retreat of American forces, Tran focuses on the effect a father's incarceration has on his family, and their struggle to create a new one in America. As the imprisoned patriarch, Long Nguyen sweats, shakes and bleeds at the inhumane hands of the Viet Cong; it is a revelatory physical performance. His family is in bad sorts too, furtively stowed aboard a boat headed towards international waters. The stunning, cramped portraiture of the families sandwiched below deck is indelible, framed against the deep black roar of the hull. The camerawork of Julie Kirkwood and Guillermo Rosas stuns throughout; contrasting the darkness are bittersweet vignettes of the family in more idyllic times, presented in a hallucinatory, Super-8 haze.

The film falters some on arriving to the States, teetering perilously close to melodrama as the family faces uncaring social service providers straight from central casting. But Tran captures the reverberations of Long's disappearance on the family, specifically the fault lines which emerge between mother Mai (impressive first-timer Diem Lien) and her mother-in-law (veteran actress Kieu Chinh, one of the SDAFF's honorees) over her grandson, aimless without a dad. It's in depicting these micro-tragedies born of war that Journey From The Fall excels, giving a voice to the voiceless.

SDAFF kicks off in earnest tomorrow, with pastoral pleaser Mongolian Ping Pong, sci-fi head-trip Puzzlehead, the Queer Shorts program, and more.

Journey From the Fall - Official Web Site

--Report by Wells Dunbar