A DOCUMENTARY BY THI BE NGUYEN AND MARIE-HÉLÈNE PANISSET
IN CINEMAS ON JULY 23, 2021
Five years after the documentary Une nuit sans lune: Boat People 40 ans après, which retraced the journey of Indochinese refugees and their integration into Canada, Thi Be Nguyen and Marie-Hélène Panisset return with a new documentary. The filmmaker Marie-Hélène Panisset follows thi Be Nguyen, a Vietnamese woman born in Laos and an Indochinese refugee, in her quest for identity that leads them to cross the three countries that made up French Indochina: Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Forty years after fleeing the Vietnam War through Laos, a Canadian refugee Boat People (Thi Be Nguyen) returns to her roots by going to find an elderly aunt who had remained there and with whom her family had lost contact. This moving reunion is the occasion of a journey of discovery in search of identity through the country of origin but also Laos and Cambodia which with Vietnam once made up French Indochina. Through encounters with ordinary people with extraordinary backgrounds, the film weaves links between decades of colonization and the outbreak of war in this region of the world. Vietnam is more than the Vietnam War, it’s 4000 years of history!
Shot with the agreement of the Vietnamese government, the film gives voice to residents and those who have made the former regions of Indochina their adopted land, including, among others: a descendant of the last Nguyen dynasty, a former revolutionary of the Indochina Wars, a great Swiss philanthropist turned citizen of Vietnam, a survivor of Agent Orange, a Cambodian Canadian who returned to her native country and a Danish woman who adopted a Vietnamese child.
