USA,
2000, 80 min
Shown in 2002
CREDITS
- dir
-
Gail Dolgin
- prod
-
Gail Dolgin
- cam
-
Vicente Franco
- editor
-
Kim Roberts
- mus
-
B. Quincy Griffin, Héctor Pérez
- source
-
Interfaze Productions, 2600 10th Street, Suite 411, Berkeley, CA 94710. FAX: 510-548-3866. EMAIL: daughter_danang@igc.org.
-
COMMENTS
Gail Dolgin, Vicente Franco, Mai Thi Hiep in person.
OTHER
The love between a mother and daughter is an almost unshakable bond, but can it survive a separation of 22 years, 9,000 miles and a vast cultural gap? As the Vietnam War drew to a close, a young woman in Danang, fearing for the safety of the child she had borne by an American soldier, gave her daughter up for adoption to the United States during Operation Babylift. In the USA, seven-year-old Mai Thi Hiep was adopted by a single woman in Pulaski, Tennessee and given a new name—Heidi. Two decades later, now married with two children of her own, Heidi sets out to find her long-lost mother in Vietnam. When Heidi is finally reunited with her mother, Mai Thi Kim, they are overwhelmed, smiling through desperate tears. But her emotional journey isn’t over—as the initial glow begins to fade, cultural differences rise to the surface. Heidi is troubled by her family’s poverty, yet is taken aback when they bluntly ask her to bring their mother to America. Her once hoped-for joyful reunion lies in tatters as the pressure to assume a role of financial responsibility becomes too much to bear, leading to an emotional climax. Daughter from Danang won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.
—Chris Slater
FACTOID #25
The San Francisco International showed Lina Wertm’ller’s first film, The Lizards, in 1963. A favorite of Bay Area audiences, her features All Screwed Up and The Seduction of Mimi had their U.S. premieres at the SFIFF in 1972 and 1974.
