Keep Saray Home documentary film by Brian Redondo

Vietnam War Legacies Film Series

Available for Educational and Public Screenings from Third World Newsreel

"The category of the Vietnam War film can also include representations of Southeast Asia during French colonialism, the brief decades of independence before the entrance of US troops, and the long legacy of the war in terms of refugee crisis, political unrest, genocide, PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), and protest."

The Vietnam War Legacies series presents documentary and experimental films from Southeast Asia, the United States, and the Southeast Asian diaspora.

Refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos share their stories in Brian Redondo's short film about Southeast Asian refugees facing deportation, Va-Megn Thoj's experimental video connecting his life in America and his birth in a secret CIA military base in the hills of Laos, and Christine Choy and JT Takagi's television documentary about refugees affected by racial tensions in California and Pennsylvania.

Vietnamese Diaspora stories include Adele Pham's documentaries on how the Vietnamese community grew the nail salon industry in the United States, Idrissou Mora-Kpai's documentary on the role of French colonialism in Vietnam and Benin, and experimental artist Tran T. Kim-Trang's meditation on motherhood and mourning.

Lastly, even our organization, Third World Newsreel or Newsreel, traces its origins to the late 60s Anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States. Founded by a collective of filmmakers in the winter of 1967, Newsreel produced independent documentary films about community groups vilified by mainstream media like Vietnam Veterans Against the War (AMERICA) and offered a realistic portrait of the American activists who organized to end the war (SUMMER 68). Members of the Newsreel collective traveled to Vietnam to record the devastation caused by the war (PEOPLE'S WAR) and to bring films that presented the conflict from a Vietnamese perspective (YOUNG PUPPETEERS OF VIETNAM).

Submit request or email twn@twn.org.

Keep Saray Home (2020)

Far from the southern border, in the outskirts of Boston, Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees are facing their own battle against family separation. ICE is detaining and deporting community members on a scale not seen before. Though families live in uncertain fear, refugees have developed a knack for pulling through. They learn to rally together and are doing everything they can to keep their families intact. This portrait of a community shaken examines the on-the-ground impact of a broken immigration system through the eyes of three families facing the deportation of a loved one. They laugh, they cry, and they fight on. Watch Trailer.

"Brian Redondo's KEEP SARAY HOME bursts the bubble that separates Boston from Louisville, the Mexican border, Portland, the Californian forests, and the unrest that inhabits this nation."

Nailed It: Vietnamese & The Nail Industry (2018)

Visit any strip mall in the United States, and there's bound to be a Vietnamese nail salon. While ubiquitous in cities across the country, few Americans know the history behind the salons and the 20 Vietnamese refugee women, who in 1975, sparked a multibillion dollar industry that supports their community to this day. Weaving powerful personal stories with insightful interviews, Nailed It, a new documentary by director Adele Free Pham, captures an unforgettable and often hilarious saga born of tragedy, charting the rise, struggle, stereotypes, and steady hold Vietnamese Americans have on today's multiethnic $8 billion dollar nail economy. Watch Trailer.

"It's a quintessentially American story of rebuilding and making something new."

Indochina: Traces of a Mother (2011)

In this documentary about a little-known chapter in African, Asian and French colonial history, a Beninese-Vietnamese orphan returns to Vietnam to look for his long-lost mother. Between 1946 and 1954, more than 60,000 African soldiers were enlisted by France to fight the Viet Minh during the First Indochina War. Pitted against one another by circumstances, African and Vietnamese fighters came into contact, and a number of African soldiers married Vietnamese women. Out of these unions, numerous mixed-race children were born. At the end of the war, the French colonial army gave orders to bring all Afro-Vietnamese children to Africa. While some children left with their mothers and fathers, others were simply taken away by their fathers, leaving their mothers behind. Children that had neither mother nor father were abandoned in orphanages and put up for mass adoption by African officers. Watch Trailer.

"INDOCHINA: TRACES OF A MOTHER gives space for the grown Afro-Vietnamese orphans to tell their stories, but also to explore the contradictions of the colonial order."

Epilogue: The Palpable Invisibility of Life (2006)

How can we make visible the invisible? How can we "see" our lost loved ones? In EPILOGUE, Vietnamese-American filmmaker Tran T. Kim Trang looks for answers to these questions in the audio recordings of her dead mother, the handwritinng of the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the ultrasound photos of her newborn baby. Finding no ready-made answers, Tran invites us to reflect about life and death in this moving video essay about motherhood and mourning. EPILOGUE is the eight and final installment of Tran's THE BLINDNESS SERIES. Download Press Kit.