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Daughter from Danang

Heidi Bub and her biologicial mother, Mai Thi Kim, reunited.

FILM FACTS

Director: Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco
Rating: Not rated
Genre: Documentary

Discuss this film | Official movie site

See showtimes (Not rated) 75 minutes

Grade: B

Verdict: A fascinating family reunion that proves Thomas Wolfe right -- you can't go home again.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

It sounds like the perfect setup for a three-hankie segment on "60 Minutes." After 22 years apart, a young woman raised in the South returns to Vietnam to visit her birth mother, whom she hasn't seen since she left home when she was 7 years old.

But "Daughter From Danang," an Oscar nominee this year for best documentary, isn't that easy. Or simplistic. It's more like a John Cassavetes movie in which wounds just keep opening.

Heidi Bub -- born Mai Thi Hiep -- was part of Operation Babylift, a U.S.-sanctioned program in 1975 whereby 2,000 orphans and Amerasian children of single mothers were airlifted to America to be adopted. The effort was part genuine concern and kindness, part we're-not-the-bad-guys grandstanding by the United States.

Heidi/Hiep was born in 1968, the daughter of Mai Thi Kim and her GI boss, who went back to the States when she was four months pregnant. Hearing rumors that the North Vietnamese were killing Amerasian children -- or perhaps worried that her husband, who had fought against the American troops, is finally coming home and may not want this particular bundle of joy -- she sends Hiep to America.

Raised in Pulaski, Tenn., Heidi found her American mom to be punitive and cold. She was told never to let people know she was from Vietnam and, in college, when she came home 10 minutes late from a date, she was locked out and told to leave. The estrangement was apparently permanent. The woman never appears in the film, and Heidi's uncle takes up the slack. Her cheerful former Girl Scout leader chimes in, "We made a Southerner out of her real quick."

Given her adoptive mother's nature, it's no wonder Heidi fantasized about her real mother, who was also fantasizing about the daughter she had to let go. Finally, Heidi flies to Vietnam and both women experience an unsettling be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenario.

The tearful initial reunion with her mother and her half-siblings is emotional for everyone. But that soon gives way to mutual distance and disappointment.

"Daughter From Danang" doesn't take sides. Filmmakers Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco simply sit back and keep the cameras rolling. (Luckily, there's nothing exploitative here, either.) What they get is a deeply human story in which, as the great film director Jean Renoir once said, everyone has their reasons. Unfortunately, these reasons don't speak the same language.